Sarisa could barely remember what her mother looked like.
After going to sea, she once heard an old sailor with graying temples say in a tavern that memories were like a fishing net dragged behind a ship. Tangled stubbornly at the bottom were either the fattest fish that had struggled the hardest or scraps of seaweed and rotten wood that were worse than trash. The countless ordinary days, meanwhile, were like seawater leaking through the holes in the net, not leaving behind a single drop.
She had not taken it seriously when she first heard it, but now that she thought about it carefully, it really was true.
Perhaps because her mother had died when she was still young, Sarisa did not remember ever arguing with her or having any other conflicts.
Everything about her mother was warm, beautiful, and happy in her memories.
But on the other hand, precisely because she had been so young, although she had already been capable of forming memories, those memories had been fragmented and broken apart by time.
Sarisa remembered the single bed in the corner of the room. It had been old and crude, creaking with a "squeak, squeak" even when she merely sat on it. She also remembered her mother's warm embrace as she held her in her sleep, and the hazy nursery rhyme that drifted softly into her ears.
But the patterns on the quilt, and the precise sensation of lying beneath it, had already become as indistinct as the wrinkles on her mother's face in her memories.
After growing up, she had heard people mention that her mother seemed to have been born into a wealthy merchant family, whose business in the Southern Islands had been doing quite well.
More than once, she had wondered whether, in another world,