That Time We Lived Together in Beijing

After earning my graduate degree, I fought tooth and nail to find a foothold in Beijing, clutching my résumé as I pushed through the crowds. Then, by chance, I stumbled into Du Yi’s world. He hadn’t attended a prestigious university. After graduating from a vocational college, he threw himself into sales. His shirts were always rumpled from being on the go, yet whenever I worked late and came home, he would have hot soup waiting on the stove. We rented a tiny, run-down apartment beyond the Fifth Ring Road. The walls were crumbling, and cold air seeped in during winter, but it became a shelter for us both. I teased him that after bowing and scraping to clients all day, he came home too exhausted to even open a bottle. He complained that I wrote proposals until the early hours and turned the living room into a paper dump. But these two people who seemed so “mismatched” bargained together at the market, shared cold bread during power outages, and pored over their pay stubs to work out next month’s rent. He remembered that I didn’t eat cilantro, and I secretly polished his shoes. Some people said I was wasting my potential, while others urged him not to hold me back. But only we knew that in this cold city of Beijing, having someone to share a meal with and wait for the lights to come back on was the most reassuring kind of happiness. The butterflies hidden in the everyday routines of food and bills, the tenderness of leaving the door unlocked for each other even after an argument: these were the most precious little things about living together.