When the autumn sycamore leaves in Paris fell on her shoulders, Wen Rui thought it was just an ordinary exchange student encounter.
In front of the bulletin board of the Sorbonne University, she ran into a pair of light gray eyes - belonging to a French teenager Antoine who was holding "The Outsider" and with sycamore wadding on the tip of his nose. He is a sophomore literature student, and she is a junior business exchange student. A cross-cultural collaborative project bound them together, from the Rainy Café in the Luxembourg Gardens to the long tables cut by sunlight in the old library, where Camus' sentences and Chinese tones intertwined in the air. She taught him to "know yourself and your enemy", and he told her about the tenderness in absurdity. There is always an unbroken layer of paper between them: the one-year age difference, the homeland of 7,000 kilometers, and the "like" that has never been spoken.
Parting came sooner than expected. When she returned to China, she counted the sunrises in Paris sent by him despite the jet lag; when he stayed in Paris, he wrote down his thoughts one stroke at a time in his Chinese vocabulary book. Until one morning, a photo of a flight ticket to China appeared on her screen - he secretly applied to her university and came across the monsoon.
This time it was him getting lost on her campus, it was him trying the spiciness of hot pot, it was him saying "miss you" in broken Chinese under the cherry blossom tree. Love is like the slowly rising tide of the Seine River, which finally reaches the shore under the lights of the night market: "Wen Rui, I like you, not as a friend."
