In the Time That Has Passed

[School life + family + BE (read with caution)]

Everyone loves reminiscing. Maybe one evening, or beneath the setting sun, you see a child chasing after something, and suddenly your heart gives a painful jolt. There's a pang of emotion. I think that's what it feels like to have lost something.

The first time I met Xia Xiaonuan, I felt she and I belonged to different worlds, or at least that we were completely different kinds of people. Girls like her are gentle, with something they want to chase and a world of their own that they long for.

The next time we met, we had both graduated from college. Just as I'd predicted back then, she might become a teacher. And just as Li Baijia had said, she would become an elementary school teacher.

Now, everything had unfolded along its expected path, but Li Baijia had vanished from this world forever. Several years had passed, yet it still felt like yesterday. If someone had hotpot and watched a movie with you yesterday, but today suddenly ceased to exist anywhere in the world, you'd start to feel as if that person had never existed at all.

Anyway, on the night Xia Xiaonuan and I met again, we ran like crazy together through the streets of Pingnan. The lights blurred around us in a riot of colors, and time seemed to be chasing us from behind.

As she ran, Xia Xiaonuan laughed and said, “Xu xxx, I xxxx you.”

I said with a solemn expression, “How can you swear like that?”

Xia Xiaonuan laughed and laughed, then started to cry.

That was the first time I saw her cry, and the last...