After 31 Years of Misaligned Teeth, They Finally Fit Together and My Heart Beats

(I beg you readers to stop and take a look, you will definitely not be disappointed. Please also comment a few more so that I can improve it.) The first time Su Nian noticed Lu Chenyi was because of the solution to a math problem marked with the word "miao" on the blackboard. What she didn't know was that this taciturn teenager had been observing alone at the school observatory for three years, recording the thirty-one-year orbital period of two binary stars - from close to far away, waiting for a periapsis that only he knew. An 800-meter fall, a borrowed MP3, and a piano song called "Deep Hypnotic Dusk." In the red light of the darkroom, he taught her how to develop film; in the twilight of the observatory, she accompanied him to wait for the seven minutes of Io's collision. He gave her a gear he made with the wrong tooth pitch - it couldn't fit into any clock, but she wore it on her chest and covered it with her body heat for countless days and nights. Two gears sawn from the same copper rod. An old clock that has stopped for nineteen years. An observatory key that took three times to get. From high school to college, from "waiting" to "walking", they move on their own orbits, but they always share the same periapsis. At the end of the story, the observation window of the observatory was open, and Tianshiyuan SZ was approaching—not thirty-one years later, but every night when they were present.