[Healing + love that grows over time + heartbreaking school romance + both chaste]
A girl gentle to the core vs. a boy who has always been solitary
On her first day transferring schools, Wen Xiaqi stood beneath the wisteria trellis for a long time.
Lu Yanci passed by, and she suddenly asked, “Will this wisteria bloom again next year?” He said it would. She smiled. He didn't understand: she hadn't been asking about the flowers.
Congenital cardiomyopathy. She wouldn't live to see eighteen. She kept it from everyone.
In winter, he took her cold hand. “Your hands are freezing.” She said, “Then hold them a little longer.” Beneath the stars on the rooftop, she clutched his sleeve. “I want us to truly fall in love, wholeheartedly.” On his piggy bank, he crookedly wrote “the south.” “After the exams, I'll take you to see the sea.” She smiled and said yes. She never told him she would never make it there.
He didn't notice, either. The water in her thermos was kept at thirty-seven degrees because her heart couldn't handle hot or cold. There were pinpricks beneath her silver bracelet. The dates on her sticky notes were follow-up appointments. When he asked about the pillbox covered in daisy stickers, she said they were candies.
A second before the shutter clicked for their graduation photo, she let go of his hand and collapsed. In the ICU, she raised a hand to touch his face. “Yanci. When you meet a girl you like someday, be a little braver.”
After she was gone, he opened her diary. The first page read: My deskmate is Lu Yanci. There is so much loneliness in his eyes. The last page read: In this life, I loved someone and was loved by him, too. His name was Lu Yanci.
From the day they met, every smile she gave him had been a countdown. And all the while, he was looking toward the ending he couldn't change: her death.
Years later, the wisteria bloomed again. Standing alone beneath the trellis, he raised an old instant camera and murmured, “Beautiful.”
No one answered.
