People can spend their whole lives haunted by what they couldn’t have when they were young. That is regret. But what is remorse? It is what you let slip away when you were young.
A promise made in youth pierced a boy’s entire adolescence like a sharp sword. By the time his eighteenth year came to an end, he still hadn’t held her hand. Amid the earnest sound of students reading aloud, in that innocent, bewildered youth, the girl’s smile seemed to make the air itself stand still in his eyes. Turn back and look at the person you once loved most, the girl you loved most in that time you can never get back. In that moment, I understood what it meant to have a secret crush, and I understood that I had to be brave.
So much time has passed, yet I always feel that this secret crush never ended. I still believe these words:
“Every love kept waiting in solitude will find an echo in another universe.”
The poems girls write are always gentle. Their thoughts are always hard to guess. Girls are always good at hiding what they feel.
Jiang An has always loved that girl, the one named Yu Mingxin. Even after more than ten years have passed, her poems remain engraved in his heart. Every night, her voice returns to his mind.
I want to go see
the clouds on the horizon,
the snow beyond the frontier.
I want to remember every sight I’ve seen:
the moon over the ancient capital,
the sun over the sandy plains,
and every person I’ve met, he, she, it, they.
I want to go farther away,
to see more of the world,
