Ten years ago, she wore a white shirt and a high ponytail, and loved wandering through the rose garden on her high school campus. He would stop and watch her turn around with a faint smile.
Ten years later, her marriage is on the verge of collapse, and she is exhausted in body and spirit, like a lost lamb. He is still right where he was, looking at her with the same deep, warm affection as before.
Faced with love that has come too late, she says, “You’re young and accomplished. I’ve never known what you do for a living, but I can tell you have plenty of power and money. A man your age, with achievements like yours, a man like you…”
He replies with a cheeky grin, “A man like me is like a firefly in the dark, a shiny chafer in the fields, so bright and so outstanding. Especially my melancholy gaze, my messy hair, the four-yuan-fifty Red Golden Dragon cigarette in my mouth, and the half-pack of Want Want snow cakes sticking out of my pocket. They all give me away.”
After her divorce, worn down in body and spirit, she is full of uncertainty and unease about her feelings for him. But every time, he shamelessly refuses to let go. In the end, she can only snap, “You scoundrel! You shameless rogue!”
Only that night, when he says with eyes full of hurt, “The plum blossoms withered, my childhood friend grew old. From then on, everyone I loved looked like you,” does she realize how long ago those memories have passed. So long that, without her even noticing, she has gone from a girl brimming with youthful energy to the battered woman she is now.
If they had stayed forever at eighteen and sixteen, would they have been spared so much pain and suffering, and the treachery of human nature?
