From School Uniforms to Wedding Dress: The Obsessive School Bully’s Ten-Year Pursuit

Love has never been the blazing passion of love at first sight. It is every step you and I take side by side through the long river of time, each one holding an unspoken “I do.” Crystal lights shattered into a river of stars above the champagne tower. As Lin Xingyu’s wedding train swept across the grand spiral staircase, she caught sight of a familiar figure. Lu Yuze, whom she used to chase around and beat up ten years ago, was raising a champagne glass and smiling at her. The light in the dimples at the corners of his lips was exactly the same as when he had shielded her from a flying basketball at a high school game. The giant screen flashed through countless snapshots of her: dozing over her desk during morning study in ninth grade, drooling while he secretly snapped a photo of the crumbs at the corner of her mouth; falling at the high school sports meet and scraping her knees bloody, yet stubbornly flashing a peace sign at the camera; and, on the day of her eighteenth-birthday ceremony, standing on tiptoe to straighten his tie, her lashes casting butterfly-wing shadows beneath her eyes. The final image was frozen on the back of their graduation photo, where he had written in pencil, the words blurred by water stains: “Next time I see you, I’m hitting you again *^O^*” From childhood nemeses fighting over strawberry cake in kindergarten to bickering sweethearts passing “idiot” notes in class, their ten years together were a tender love letter tucked into the folds of time: A strawberry-scented flutter at six, a school desk at fifteen, a sheltering embrace in a storm at eighteen, and a long-distance code at twenty-two. Moonlight washed over the subtle patterns on her wedding dress. Looking back, she suddenly understood: the best kind of love is a heartbeat hidden in a prank, an umbrella tilted at a forty-five-degree angle in a downpour, and the tenderness with which time turns “childish” into “just for you.” The “I love you” they never said aloud had long since become an everlasting anthem, spanning the distance from school uniforms to wedding dresses.