When she was seven, Lin Zhi gave a gardenia plant to the little boy next door who was moving away, telling him, “You have to remember me.” Fifteen years later, she was an exhausted advertising professional, stranded by a flight delay at the airport on a rainy night. A strange man sat beside her.
He handed her a blanket and said, “I'm here.” He told her he'd take her to eat the best barbecue, and that her name sounded like gardenias. He said, “I'm getting to know you. Picking you up is a one-night thing; getting to know someone takes time.”
Only when he took out a yellowed Polaroid, showing a little girl with two braids standing beneath a gardenia tree, did Lin Zhi understand: somewhere in this world, there really was someone who had never forgotten her since she was seven.
