When Lin Zhixu was seventeen years old, he planned his entire life using Excel spreadsheets.
Get married at twenty-eight, have a child at thirty, and have a second child at thirty-two. Buy a house in a school district, have your children go to the best schools, and retire to the beach. Every step is clear, just like the force analysis in physics problems - gravity is downward and support force is upward. As long as the formulas are listed correctly, there will be no mistakes.
The only one she didn't include was Lu Siqi.
The first grader who came out of the mining area, the boy who said "because I can't get below ninety-eight" when he gave her a question in the training classroom. She thought he had the correct answer and if she filled it in, she would get full marks.
But she forgot that life is not a physics problem.
There are no standard answers, no steps, no eraser to erase and start over.
In the spring when he was thirty-five, Lin Zhixu stood on the balcony and looked at the lights on the building opposite. Behind him is a sleeping child, and on the phone is a WeChat message from Lu Siqi: Let's talk.
She suddenly remembered the book "Haizi's Poems" that another boy handed her many years ago. There is a line written on the title page: When you want to write, use this notebook.
She wrote. Write about their seventeen-year-olds, their twenty-year-olds, those passing by and reunions after a long absence. Write about the last photo in Shen Luxi's camera, write about the code Gu Huaian typed out all night outside the ICU, and write about those late nights when Lu Siqi sat alone in the garage.
But what she never wrote was——
She still keeps that notebook.
And the person who handed me the book has not been seen for many years.
