It was raining the day they met again. As Mu Feng stepped out from the corner of an office building, holding a black umbrella, Xu Linyue was sheltering beneath the eaves with a stack of files in her arms. The instant he tilted the umbrella toward her, they both noticed the silver rings on each other's ring fingers. A drop of water from the umbrella's ribs fell onto her hair, just like the white locust blossoms that fluttered down twelve years ago, when the boy Mu Feng gently plucked one from her ponytail on a sweltering afternoon filled with the incessant buzz of cicadas.
Their first love, spanning more than a decade, had become the sharpest shard of glass in the river of time. Every memory of it sent fresh beads of blood seeping from the heart's softest folds. As two adults, both scarred, try to use new romances to bandage old wounds, will the heartbeats buried in their school-uniform pockets, the notes hidden in pencil cases, and the promises carved into yearbooks suddenly come back to life on some rainy night?
If we hadn't let go back then, would we still pretend not to know each other at this crossroads? Now that every youthful passion has become a taboo no one dares discuss, can we still find that first, pure heartbeat among the shards of time?
