At seventeen, Su Nianqing’s life consisted of only two things: a school uniform washed pale from wear and her mother’s endless scolding. Then, on a chilly autumn day, a pen was gently passed to her from the back row. That was how Shen Zhiheng, carrying the clean warmth of sunlight, broke into her airless world.
He was the quiet boy in the last seat by the window, the one who carried her on his back without hesitation when she fainted from low blood sugar. Between exam papers and the morning light, two lonely souls awkwardly warmed each other with notes passed to the wrong person and furtive glances. His savings notebook was filled with “Nianqing’s future,” while the crooked scarf she knitted kept him warm all winter.
But reality was a net tightening around them. Su’s mother kept escalating her surveillance, and the diary torn to pieces seemed to foreshadow their doomed first love. The vivid red Shen Zhiheng wiped away behind his back whenever he coughed, Su Nianqing’s knees going numb with cold as she waited outside his door in the middle of the night, Lin Wanxing’s casual remark, “I’m the only one who knows how to take care of him”… At last, all those tiny cracks came crashing together on the day the college entrance exams ended.
The operating room lights went out. From then on, Su Nianqing’s world was split in two: the seventeen years she had Shen Zhiheng, and the long life ahead without him.
It turned out some people enter your life only to leave you living forever in the shadow of losing them. It turned out you should never meet someone too dazzling when you are young, or every step you take across the vast world will feel like a journey to a meeting that will never come.
“Zhiheng,” she whispered by the sea. The wind scattered her words. “Look, I’ve come such a long way for you.”
But mountains upon mountains stood like barriers. She crossed a thousand peaks and ten thousand rivers, yet could never return to that summer when he was there.
