In the dim glow of the coffee shop’s waning light, Mei sat hunched over a patchwork of papers and tangled an extension cord across the table. “You’ve disconnected again, didn’t you?” she murmured softly, as though mourning a familiar loss. Her words floated past the azaleas painting the window pane with their apparent serenity.

“It’s not that simple,” Jian replied, his voice as calm and sharp as the breeze whispering past. He toyed with a sugar packet, turning it over in his fingers like an old habit too stubborn to die. “Not everything can be fixed with a 人造的 extension cord.”

“No, not everything,” Mei acknowledged, her fingers dancing lightly across the pages—a musical ruffling in her mind, poignant yet out of sight. “But stars aren’t always this elusive in dreams, right?”

His gaze settled but did not stay. “We’re here again,” he noted, tapping the table as if checking for ghosts of their past. “If this isn’t life’s 修罗场, I don’t know what is.”

She laughed or tried to—a brittle sound folding into itself like a paper crane lost at sea. “Life keeps amusing us in this endless ‘circle of twos’, doesn’t it? You, always elusive; I, ever reckoning—like twilight and dawn almost meeting.”

Jian leaned back. In his eyes, a spark that flared only under the right spectrum. “Do you think we rotate through these twists for a reason?” His question was sharp, a needle threading the fabric they continually reworked but never completed.

“If we’re stars in the eyes of the universe,” Mei ventured, “does that make this our destined entanglement? I can never see us static—always orbiting yet never converging.”

A moment’s silence filled the space; hearts beating to a rhythm only they could decipher. The world outside seemed to still, the azaleas clinging silently to their perch.

“Do you trust these connections, then?” he asked. “The ones we forge again and again, only to unravel in the end?”

She traced the edge of the extension cord, a symphony of imagined equations humming at her touch. “A part of me believes—I think I have to—that reincarnation is our map, our imperfect lottery.”

“Or just strings controlled by a distant puppeteer?” His question hung between them, thin as silkworm thread but rich with unspoken ties.

“It’s a gamble, less orchestrated, more like poetry read aloud to an unseeing crowd,” she declared, letting the moment stretch without resolution, a fleeting grace weaving strands of new beginnings and endings.

Jian sighed, the sound a muted acknowledgment. “Then let’s tether our impossible again, see if we can finally light the right pathways.”

Mei, eyes alight with what felt like stars, nodded. “I would like that,” she said. There was no promise of reunion, only the dance, as ethereal as the sea foam, as grounded as the earth.

The extension cord lay between them, bright and artificial, a testament to the connections they sought but never truly captured within reach, whispering of futures yet unseen or lived before.

And so, they danced again, entwining their hearts in the cyclical parade of reincarnated constellations—eternally chasing, eternally returning. A love song shaped by voices woven into the rhythm of time.