Seventeen-year-old Lin Xiaoyu hides a secret that is more fragile than morning dew - she likes Chen Yu, a boy who always raises his chin on the basketball court.
Ever since she accidentally took the meat bun from him in the first grade of junior high school, this love was like a dandelion beside the playground, quietly taking root in her heart. She calculated the angle of morning exercises to look at his sun-lit side face, deliberately went to the cafeteria ten minutes late just to share the same window view with him, and even joined an unfamiliar track and field team just so she could use her peripheral vision to trace the arc of his shot during training breaks.
Those gazes hidden in the dust, the unhanded gloves, and the distant glances between the balcony railings constitute the entire footnote of the girl's thoughts. She watched him receive piles of love letters, watched his neck raised in the first snow, watched his fingertips fly when he high-fived his teammates, but she never dared to let her heartbeat cross that invisible boundary.
This is a long, one-person grand secret love. All the unspoken words were written on the back of the notebook, all the deliberately created encounters were hidden at regular times, and the boy in the black vest was always the brightest and most distant morning light in her youth.
It wasn't until she turned over the yellowed pages many years later that she discovered that those carefully guarded moments might contain responses she hadn't noticed - like the way his gaze always turned toward the playground when he was shooting, like the towel he put on the railing that he hadn't yet taken away, or like the gaze he placed on her that never moved away on that first snowy day.
It turns out that some love never needs to be revealed. Just thinking about it is enough to warm the whole youth.
