Shanghai in 2020 is like a piano that never stops playing, with every street corner sounding a different melody. Chen Luolin, who came from a mountain village in Guizhou, stands beneath an overpass in Lujiazui with his guitar on his back, feeling the city’s clamor and distance for the first time. He believes music can hold the morning mist of his hometown, the frogs croaking in the rice paddies, and the innocence he cannot bear to leave behind. Li Yi’s cosmetics shop sits beneath the plane trees in the former French Concession. Its glass windows reflect the hurried shadows of passersby as she builds her vision of the future with elegant little bottles and jars: a life that is stable, respectable, and easy to trace.
Their parallel paths cross one rainy day in a convenience store. She buys a scrap of paper with a melody he jotted down, and he tastes the sweetness hidden in the hot coffee she hands him. Over two years, they use their own warmth to mend each other’s broken places, but between Guizhou’s mountains and Shanghai’s high-rises, they gradually grow into different shapes. When Li Yi puts on someone else’s wedding dress, Chen Luolin finally finishes the song he left incomplete. It isn’t about reunion, but about gratitude for having once drawn so close, so earnestly. Some loves are destined to head toward separate horizons, like two rivers that meet once before flowing into the sea on their own.
