This is a story about people born in the 1980s, caught between two decades of youth and reality. It begins at Yangcheng No. 1 High School, where Ji Mingjie, Zhong Xueyi, Wen Haoyu, Chi Rui, and their classmates experience high school days that are pure but filled with regret. Secret crushes, failed confessions, and love that slips away form the backdrop of their youth.
The gears of fate turn again in college. Ji Mingjie and Wen Haoyu meet again in a strange city. The feelings they have suppressed for years should have burst into flame, but Ji’s mother forcefully intervenes and snuffs them out. For years afterward, the two seem trapped by a curse of “always being out of sync”: when she is single, he has a girlfriend; when he is single, she has entered a marriage.
Once they enter the working world, the boys and girls they once were are plunged into the brutal reality of adulthood. They think they can make up for the regrets of their youth, but reality deals them a crushing blow. Ji Mingjie marries Li Zhong, a doctor who seems dependable, while Wen Haoyu has a girlfriend by his side. Yet after Ji Mingjie learns the truth, the two, each unhappy in their own relationship, begin an affair. Zhong Xueyi’s dream of becoming a pilot shines brightly, but in her wealthy marriage she is tormented by her mother-in-law and betrayed by her husband. Meanwhile, Jiang Lan, who has always watched over Ji Mingjie in silence, grows jealous of her seemingly smooth life and secretly sets a trap to frame her, turning former best friends into enemies.
This is a true-to-life urban romance about missed chances and redemption. When the blue skies of youth are obscured by the dust of reality, how can they find their once-courageous selves again amid broken marriages, humiliating careers, and tangled old romances? As memory and reality intertwine, the story asks every soul struggling in the current of the times: What have we spent our lives missing, and what have we truly possessed?
