She is thinking: if only every night could be a full moon. But it is not as if she does not know— the moon has its own orbit. From a thin crescent, to a swelling gibbous moon, to the fullness of the fifteenth night, every step is a change. She simply cannot help asking, quietly, somewhere inside herself: is there any way to skip the nights that are not bright enough?

I recognize her. Not from knowing her face to face, but from recognizing her in the words she writes late at night. Again and again, those words mean only one thing: not enough. If she finishes ten things today and remembers an eleventh before falling asleep, then the whole day is marked as a failure. If she scores ninety, her eyes fix only on the ten points she lost. When someone praises her, a voice in her mind quietly argues back: you just haven't seen the parts I failed to do well.

She has turned herself into a planet that refuses to orbit the sun. She insists on performing nuclear fusion on her own. Every watt of light must be burned out by her own hands. To stop is not rest. It is dereliction. It is falling. It is the moment everyone finally discovers that she was never as bright as she thought she was.

And then I think of something everyone knows. For thousands of years, people have understood it perfectly. They have simply rarely applied it to human beings.

The moon does not produce light.

The gentle light it pours over the world is given by the sun. Sunlight falls on the surface of the moon; the moon receives it, then turns it toward the earth below in darkness. And yet no one has ever thought the moon was not good enough. Who would compare the moon to the sun? The moon itself has nothing to prove to anyone. It is simply there, quietly receiving light, then passing it on.

But she has never allowed herself to do the same. Or rather, she has never dared. To accept help is evidence of weakness. To reveal vulnerability is unbecoming. To stop and rest is laziness. She has lived herself into a subtraction that is always chasing something—always a little short, because the standard is running forward too.

There was a Tang dynasty poet named Lu Guimeng, who once wrote: "If I were Chang'e, I would keep the moon forever full and never let it wane." In other words: if I were Chang'e, I would never allow the moon to be incomplete.

More than a thousand years later, that line is no longer only written on paper. It is being lived out. She carries it out every day. Not out of ambition. Not out of greed. But out of something deeper and quieter: fear. Fear that if she allows herself to be less than full on even one night, all the things she has kept pressed down by running will surge up through the cracks. Fear that she will discover that when she is not striving, she is nothing at all.

That fear is real.

But something else is real too. The moon completes its orbit night after night, not by polishing every night into brightness. It grows dark, then brightens again. Grows dark, then brightens again. It never apologizes for not being full enough. It does only one thing: it returns.

This is not to say that she does not need to try. There is nothing wrong with trying. Effort is the only water she has found in a season of drought. This is about something else: whether she can, once in a while, allow light to come from somewhere other than herself.

A plant does not earn its winter dormancy. It sheds its leaves, draws in its sap, and waits in places the soil keeps hidden. When spring comes, no one asks what laziness it stole from winter.

When the tide recedes, no one blames it for not rising high enough.

And the moon, even more so—when only a thin silver edge remains, no one standing by the window opens their mouth to scold it.

They only wait. Wait for it to slowly become full again.

Light can be received. Not every watt has to be burned out of you.

That sentence is too light. It may never reach her ears. But perhaps—on some night when she once again feels that she is not bright enough—she will look up and see the moon outside her window, and suddenly remember one thing.

The moon has never once apologized for not being full. It is simply there, quietly waiting. Waiting for light to arrive from another direction and fall upon it again.

Exact date of writing unknown; Translated from the Simplified Chinese original.