Love and goodbye both take courage.
[Sensitive girl Pei Yizhen × dazzling senior Yang Xu]
In the most insecure years of her girlhood, she once loved someone with all her heart.
During military training in the summer when she was seventeen, one glimpse beneath the blazing sun left Yang Xi’s name imprinted on Pei Yizhen’s entire youth.
He was her military training instructor in her first year of high school, and a dazzling senior who had chosen to repeat a year because his grades weren’t good enough.
He placed a candy in her palm. The 0.5 seconds their fingertips brushed became the loudest heartbeat of her youth.
Afterward, she walked every corner of the teaching building just for a chance “encounter.” She pored over her history textbook just so she’d have an excuse to ask him a question. She even began looking forward to morning exercises, just for three seconds walking beside him.
But when they met in real life, her insecurity coiled around her heart like vines, leaving her able only to hide in a corner and gaze up at his light.
Only after he graduated and left did she send him a 1,300-word confession in the dead of night, then flee in panic the moment he replied.
She thought this was the right way to love someone: quietly, with restraint, without asking for a response.
Then, in the winter when she was twenty-one, Lu Youyou asked her, “Have you ever considered that you’ve confused ‘liking him’ with ‘bringing this unrequited love to an end’?”
Only then did she realize that what held her back was no longer that person, but the version of herself who “had to give it a perfect ending.”
It took Pei Yizhen seven years to finally tell herself: You can graduate from this unrequited love now.
