Jiang Huai is my roommate.
He sang on the sports field the night of military training. The spotlight fell on him, and the whole field fell silent. From that moment on, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
I saved him seats, brought him late-night snacks, and waited outside the studio until the early hours while he finished his drawings. When he had a fever, I stood in line for twenty minutes to buy him preserved egg and lean pork congee. When he was preparing for graduate school, I looked up the window orientations of every firm for him. He never said “thank you.” He just left soy milk on my bedside table, then wrote a tiny note in architectural lettering in the bottom-right corner of his drawings: Lin Xu says we could add a window here.
I thought there was a distance between us that he would never cross. Then, in the bleachers, he handed me his other earbud and said, “I want to take you to places even better than this field.” Then, in a hotel room during a spring outing, he let me hold him as we slept through the night. When morning came, he said nothing, just smoothed down my tousled hair. Then someone confessed to him. After turning them down, he sat beside me and asked, “Who do you think I like?”
This is a story about unrequited love, waiting, and slowly drawing closer. There are no grand declarations, no melodramatic misunderstandings. Just the everyday lives of two boys from freshman year through graduation: saving seats, bringing meals, rushing to finish drawings, giving each other the cold shoulder and making up. Sharing a scarf and listening to the same song in the stadium bleachers, huddling together for warmth on a narrow dorm bed. He hid every sign of caring behind “while I’m at it” and “just in case.” It took me four years to believe that the spot in the bottom-right corner of his drawings would always be mine.
