Sleeping Before the Spring Snow

The seventeen-year-old ginkgo leaf failed to fall into his exercise book, but the twenty-nine-year-old Dong Xue dyed the ends of her hair white first. From the liberal arts class to the teaching position, Cheng Yu'an hid the three words "Jiang Tinglan" as the most silent punctuation in his youth; and the young man who always calculated the future on scratch paper never knew how much scalding twelve years were hidden in the two cans of hot drinks she held when they met again at the convenience store. When the hospital bed monitor flattened out all the heartbeats, the thumping that was crushed on the edge of the graduation photo, the cold candied roasted chestnuts at the subway entrance, and the unfinished confessions on the back of the medical records, finally, together with the yellowed classmates' records, became star trails in two parallel universes that would never intersect.