A Quiet Kind of Love

[A secret crush is a quiet, unspoken kind of love]

[Secret crush | Rekindled romance | Mutual yearning]

Avoidant attachment meets a hopeless romantic determined to win them over

At seventeen, Mu Zhiyi had a crush on Nan Jia, an upperclassman at her school.

The year of the college entrance exams, Mu Zhiyi and her best friend watched a movie. The two leads didn’t end up together, and neither got what they wanted.

There was a line in the movie that Mu Zhiyi still remembers: Maybe we should all learn to accept that the person we like might not like us back.

Mu Zhiyi’s name comes from a line in the poem “Xizhou Melody”: “The south wind knows my heart, and carries my dream to Xizhou.”

But when she was eighteen, Mu Zhiyi wrote: “The south wind knows not my heart.”

1.

During her first year of college, Mu Zhiyi arrived late after taking a month off, her admission letter in hand. At the campus clinic, she met a man wearing a mask. She thought it would be just a fleeting encounter.

She never expected that, after hailing a taxi at the school gate, she’d be stopped by someone asking, “Hey, can I share the ride? I think we’re headed to the same place.”

2.

At first, He Yuyang barely remembered the quiet, reserved girl. Their chance encounter had made little impression on him. Only later did he realize he had already fallen for that quiet, distant girl.

At twenty, He Yuyang began a silent, unspoken romance, because he was afraid of scaring away the “scaredy-cat” who dreaded relationships.

3.

One day, He Yuyang suddenly said to Mu Zhiyi, “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For ‘The south wind knows not my heart.’ But luckily, ‘Zhiyi knows my heart.’”

This story contains a lot of fictional liberties. Please don’t overanalyze it.