Waiting for Her Twenty-Seventh Year

She waited for twenty-seven years and finally said "I love you". But what awaits may be a goodbye that is too late to say goodbye. --- On the day Zhang Ruoheng signed the divorce agreement, he received an unsigned letter. There is only one line on the letter paper: "Miss Zhang, your wife is still waiting for you to love her." She recognized the handwriting - not from the person she had been waiting for all her life, but from a past that she had pushed away with her own hands. Song Wanqing, her college sweetheart, was broken up by her mother, abandoned by herself, and deleted from her life for fifteen years. Now I am lying on the bed of the cancer hospital, bald, thin, with advanced intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma. The doctor said she only had half a year left. Zhang Ruoheng opened the door of the ward with a confession that was twenty years late. But what Song Wanqing gave her was not a hug or tears, but a brown paper bag. Inside are 3,721 photos - all of Zhang Ruoheng's back, spanning fifteen years, from Shanghai to Beijing, from subway stations to office buildings. "I've been looking at you," Song Wanqing said, "but you never looked back." This is a story about "turning back". Two women, twenty-seven years, from youth to middle age, from separation to reunion, from "I let you go" to "I will never leave again." When death approaches step by step, they finally learn to stop escaping - not from each other, not from themselves, not from the word that has never been spoken. Love doesn't wait, it comes. The two people who had taken a detour for twenty-seven years finally bumped into each other on the same straight line.