Unrequited Love Is a Poem Gone Stale

For three years of high school, they wrote poems with their eyes and spoke through silence. Shen Lin wrote her initials in the corner of his physics textbook. On the night before graduation, he slipped a poem into her schoolbag. Lu Chuyang treasured that eraser and filled her diary with his name. But because of their insecurities, their timidity, and countless twists of fate, the interruption backstage at the New Year’s Eve show, the chance encounter on a winter street that someone witnessed, the message that was never sent, those words, “I like you,” were never spoken.

On graduation day, the sound of traffic drowned out what Shen Lin had left unsaid. The message Lu Chuyang never sent stayed on her phone forever. They went their separate ways and never kept in touch.

In college, Xu Yi’s gentle companionship slowly melted Lu Chuyang’s heart, and the two of them got together. Shen Lin and Song Anran grew closer through frequent contact, and eventually married. Years later, at a class reunion, they briefly met each other’s eyes across the street, but neither took a step forward.

Twenty years later, Lin Sui happens upon five pieces of paper Shen Lin had hidden in an old book. They are the silent confession he wrote over more than twenty years: the poem from the night before graduation, a greeting from college that never got a reply, the acceptance he found when he turned away after their chance encounter on the street, the gaze he sent across the road on the night of the reunion, and countless “what ifs” written in the dead of night. All along, he had been saying “I like you” to her in this way, over and over. She simply never heard a word of it.

But by the time those confessions are finally read, it is already too late. They each have their own lives and families, separated by more than twenty years and an entire river called “what if.” There is no going back.