That summer, she just sat quietly under the loquat tree and read a book. Across the courtyard wall, he stood at the entrance of the alley and looked at her for a long time. From that moment on, he knew one thing - this girl must belong to him.
He found out everything about her and began to appear frequently in her life. When she ran away, he chased her back, and then used the people around her to force her to stay. Her roommate's transfer quota, her father's job, her mother's job security - he cut off all her escape routes until she had no other way out.
She tried resisting, running away, being silent, and feeding on hate. Day after day, year after year, her anger was worn into numbness by time. He begins to truly love her, clumsily imitating the taste of her favorite bowl of soup, and changing the entire house to her favorite color when she becomes pregnant. But his love was never expressed in the form of "please" - if he wanted her to stay, she had to stay.
She finally resigned herself to her fate. They got married and had children, and the loquat tree in the yard grew from a sapling to bearing fruit. She sat under the eaves of the porch and watched her daughter squatting next to the roots of the tree burying fruit pits. She suddenly thought that she would never go back to the way she did when she was nineteen years old, reading books.
She took away his paranoia, he took away her freedom, and the wounds they inflicted on each other ended up forming the same scar.
That's not perfect love. It was a long-lasting symbiosis that was immersed in the bones and blood, shaped by disordered approach and slow acceptance. And the only thing he can give her is one season after another - waiting for her to look back, waiting for her to get used to it, waiting for her to live into the winter he arranged by his own hands, and then find that spring has come.
