The sound of rain came from the headphones and outside the window at the same time. I can’t tell which side is louder.

On the screen is our rehearsal room, the guitar is leaning on an empty chair, and the paper on the music stand is blown up by the virtual wind. It’s been a month, and I still dare not look at the standing microphone.

This game teaches me how to talk to the deceased — with a beat. When a friend speaks, his words will flow on the timeline like a note. I have to press the button to respond at an invisible point. Too early will interrupt, and too late will make sadness hang in the air. My mother said, “I bought your favorite beans again.” I pressed the word “love” at the moment, and her shoulders sank slightly, as if she had finally unloaded a little weight.

At first, I was always wrong. I was silent when my teammates roared, and I was anxious to comfort my sister when she sobbed. Later, I learned to listen with my eyes closed. Some sentences fall heavily to the ground and can’t be touched until they fall completely to the ground; some sentences are so light that they seem to float away that they have to be gently pulled before they leave the ground. My fingers began to remember the weight of each emotion.

The most difficult thing is those flashbacks. The picture suddenly cut to the first apartment we rented. She sat on the floor and tuned the strings, and the sun dyed her hair amber. The dialog box flashed, and the cursor was waiting for me. I was stunned for a long time, and it was not until the sound of rain filled all the silence that I slowly said, “The floor is still a little cold, right?”

When I pressed the back button, a very light piano sounded in the game. There is only one note, hanging in the air, and then slowly dissipating.

The part of writing songs seems to be sorting out relics. The game gave me a bunch of word fragments: “The clothesline is always dripping”, “The third subway station”, “The kind of candy you said is too sweet”. I collect them by completing the dialogue, and then drag them into the blank score. When I dragged “The Light That Always Forgets to Turn Off” into the chorus, a small verse of noise suddenly appeared in the melody; put “Repeated Nightmare” into the interlude, and the drum beat began to chase me in a panic. I seem to assemble the fragments of our scattered life into mosaics. Every time I paste a piece, I cover a little bit of the color of the past.

When I was about to pass the level, the game asked me to “talk” with her. What she may have said appeared on the black screen:

“The mint on the balcony is withered.”

“You frown when you fall asleep.”

“It’s raining.”

There is no option, only a blank input box. I tried to write a long word, but I deleted it again. In the end, there is often only one “um”, or longer, just let the cursor flash there. The system does not evaluate, but it will generate a short piece of music based on what I enter. I wrote “I learned to make the soup you often cook”, and the music became warm and long; I left three minutes blank and only hit a full stop, but what I heard was the sound of rain gradually dripping, mixed with the vague song of the old radio station.

It turns out that there are some dialogues that only need to prove that it happened.

The ending is a performance without an audience. In the empty bar, the spotlight illuminated me and the empty chair. When I finished playing the last chord, the virtual applause did not sound. The picture darkened, and the rain in reality just stopped.

I took off my headphones, and the world was so quiet that I could hear the sound of water dripping from the water pipe upstairs. Ta. Ta. Someone’s footsteps are slowly walking away.

Afterlove EP didn’t teach me how to say goodbye. It just made me sit there and practice listening to those silent sounds over and over again until my ears could distinguish — between the sound of rain outside the window, the sound of the neighbor’s TV, and the buzzing of the refrigerator — there was a short silence, which was just enough to put down a chord that could not be said.

And love may be like this: even if the ensemble has left, your fingers will still hang above the strings, waiting for the beat that will never come again. It’s not waiting for a reply, it’s just confirmation — silence itself is also a kind of trembling.