Sophora Branch Falling Into the Night

In the damp stairwell of a small-town middle school, a boy’s backlit silhouette caught the edge of a girl’s eye, concealing the unspoken flutter behind their graduation photo. During their high school years at separate schools, moonlight carried love poems written in the margins of their homework notebooks, while ginger tea steamed into misty promises on either side of a wall on winter nights. The embrace they missed on the stormy night of the college entrance exams was finally continued on the last subway train, where they worked part-time during university.

They returned to their hometown with the pothos they had grown in the attic of a village in the city. Paper kites flew from Yang Yuan’s elementary school classroom, and Liu Yuhuai’s engineering blueprints covered the springtime hills. The school uniforms they had once given each other became canvases for their children’s doodles, and the playground where they flew kites still carried the scent of pagoda blossoms from when they were sixteen. The postman of time had never lost a single promise: from the scrap of paper reading “Meet me at the top” to their marriage certificate, from two yellowed portraits to a family photo of four, their youthful affection had finally grown into roots sinking deep into the earth.