Red Roses and Forget-Me-Nots: My First Love

Amid the whir of sewing machines at the Three Star Woolen Textile Mill lies the most passionate love of their lives, in 1997. He is a young worker in the factory, quietly working up the courage to speak; she is a machine operator with her hair in braids. Their love grows like cotton thread in the workshop: from secretly watching her profile as she winds thread, to clutching a love letter until it crumples in his palm, to the reply at the factory gate, damp with sweat. It is quiet and subtle, yet it winds ever tighter. They whisper beneath the poplars by the cement road and share donkey-meat flatbreads under the oil lamp at the little shop. On payday at the market, her eyes shine brighter than the bulbs as she gazes at a red velvet hair flower. But the separation comes without warning. He sets off home clutching the white scarf she knitted, and when the train pulls away, her figure on the platform becomes the heartache that haunts him for the next twenty years. To find her, he walks until his shoes wear through in the bitter winter and chews on hard steamed buns in unfamiliar county towns. To forget her, he treats women who resemble her as shadows, yet whenever he embraces one, he remembers the soapberry scent in her hair. More than twenty years pass. The glass cases of a craft shop are filled with countless exquisite ornaments, but none can hold the promise he failed to keep at the factory gate that year. Some love goes unspoken and becomes a scar that never fades. Some people slip away and become a longing that lasts a lifetime.