[Childhood Sweethearts + Secretly in Love With Each Other + Love That Grows Over Time + Tension That Keeps Building]
When I was thirteen, Chen Xi came to live with my family.
She was like a timid little cat: quiet and well-behaved, only taking food from the dishes in front of her, with two faint dimples when she smiled.
I rode my bike with her to school, made her tomato-and-egg noodles, and helped her with math. When she called me “Jiang Yi,” her voice was as soft as a spring sprout.
I don’t know when I started falling for her.
Maybe it was the moment she looked back at me in the snow, flakes sparkling on her eyelashes. Maybe it was the night she buried her head in the noodles I’d made and drank every last drop of soup. Maybe it was when she told me beneath the sunset, “I miss you too.”
But before I could say it, her mother took her abroad.
After she left, I learned how to lie awake at night.
I waited by my phone for her messages, looked over her photos again and again, and sat lost in thought in the room where she used to live. For three years, I saved up a stomachful of things to say, but all I typed in the dead of night were four words:
“I miss you so much.”
