Blue Irises Have No Spring
Some heartbeats are like math problems solved incorrectly. You know there's no answer, but you insist on working them out to the very last page.
Lin Wu has always felt that Jiang Yubai is someone who lives on scratch paper.
His school uniform always carries the scent of ink. A red string around his left wrist marks the pride of a competition student, and the angle of his lowered lashes as he solves problems looks like a carefully calculated parabola.
And she is like a piece of instant film soaked by the rain,
her essays filled with Wong Kar-wai quotes, using lines from movies to hide the hurt of her parents' divorce, and tucking away her secret crush on an older student in the crack of her Doraemon keychain.
Jiang Yubai is convinced Lin Wu is an unsolvable problem.
When she steps on the toe of his AJ shoe to pick up an eraser, the tips of her hair are stained with blue ink, like an iris bleeding across rice paper;
when she bites her lip while reading love poems over the school broadcast, it's more mind-bending than the Goldbach conjecture he just proved;
when she answers his math question with a line from Chungking Express, he finally writes on the back of his book of incorrect answers:
"Lin Wu's Law, Rule 83:
Whenever her lashes flutter at 5.2 hertz, all my formulas collapse into a heart-shaped function."
A torrential downpour soaks the 83 letters they never sent. Ten years later, at a class reunion, his cuff link hides a transplant scar, while her wedding ring reflects the KTV's cheap colored lights.
When the melody of "Later" begins to play, they finally understand the time capsule they had hidden in the tree hollow, its contents out of sync with time.
The most painful regret, it turns out, is having almost found the courage to love.
