Light in Mud

At the ten-year high school graduation party, I saw an old photo on Chen Yu's phone. It was an embarrassing shot of me falling into a mud puddle during a sports day in my senior year of high school. My school uniform was stained with mud and my hair was stuck to my face. "So you kept this?" My voice trembled. He pointed at the photo with drunken eyes: "At that time, I thought you looked very much like..." Before he finished speaking, he fell asleep on the sofa. No one knows that I peeked at the tracing book in his studio that year. Every page is me: the silhouette in class, the back in the corridor, and this moment of wrestling. Before graduation, I mustered up the courage to stuff a love letter into his textbook. But in the next second he withdrew and tore into pieces. He sent a message in the early morning: "Send a photo because I thought you looked like a warrior at that time." "I've been waiting for your second letter."