Heaven Was Just Where You Were.
She was never meant to love. She only to guide souls home.
An angel with no memory of her human life, she walks quietly among the living, drawn to beauty, kindness, and the fragile hearts of abandoned animals. Love was never part of her destiny until she met him.
He is a painter with gentle hands and a heart too large for the world he lives in. He rescues what others leave behind, believing that as long as something is loved, it can still be saved.
Their worlds were never meant to touch. Yet love found them anyway, soft, silent, and irreversible.
As his life begins to fade, she breaks every rule heaven ever gave her, choosing to stay, to love, to grieve like a human. She learns too late that even angels cannot bargain with time.
But some loves do not end with death.
In heaven, where lost souls finally rest, they meet again, not as an angel and a dying man, but as two hearts that found each other through kindness, devotion, and a love that refused to disappear.
Because when you love all living things deeply enough, love will always find its way back to you.
(Do you still remember the COVID-19 tragedy? And yet, five years have already passed.
It may sound as though it has nothing to do with my book, but strangely enough, this story was inspired by that very event, or more precisely, by one of the moments from those painful years that brought me to tears.
At the time, I was only sixteen or seventeen, an age still too young to accomplish anything truly significant. By that, I mean writing a story good enough to convey what I wanted to convey, to hide metaphors where they belonged, while still remaining dramatic and creative. So please, don’t expect too much from this book, because it was written and completed during that period of my life.
That winter, a working-class couple in Ho Chi Minh City, where the pandemic was at its most severe were forced to return to their hometown because they could no longer survive in the city. They traveled by motorbike, carrying all of their dogs and cats with them, refusing to leave any behind. I cried the moment I saw that image.
Not long after, another incident occurred, one that filled me with anger. A couple broke up and in the aftermath, they cruelly ended the life of the cat they had raised together.
Those two events were recreated in this story and became the opening incidents that set in motion the fateful bond between the male and female leads.
I have thought many times about revising this book, but in the end, I chose not to. (I won’t say it was because I was lazy.) The truth is I wanted to preserve its essence, the thoughts, emotions, and rawness of my sixteen-year-old self, the most unpolished version of my writing.
This will not be my best work. But it is the first book I ever completed. The first one that made me cry when I finished writing it.
It carries my humanity, my soul, and the handwriting of who I was at sixteen.
The story is gentle, there is no overwhelming drama, no explosive twists. But I hope, in its quiet way, it will find its way into your heart.)
