Jianghuai is my roommate.
On the night of the military training, he sang on the playground. The searchlight light fell on him and the whole playground fell silent. From that moment on, I couldn't take my eyes off him.
I helped him occupy a seat, gave him late-night snacks, and waited outside the professional classroom for him to finish drawing in the early hours of the morning. When he had a fever, I stood in line for 20 minutes to buy preserved egg and lean meat porridge. When he was taking the postgraduate entrance examination, I helped him check the directions of the windows of all companies. He never said "thank you", he would just put the soy milk on my bedside table, and then write a line of small words in engineering characters in the lower right corner of the drawing: Lin Xu said a window can be added here.
I thought there was a distance between us that he would never cross. Until he handed me the other earphone in the playground bleachers and said, "I want to take you to a better place than the playground." Until he was held in my arms and slept all night in the hotel room during the spring outing. When he got up in the morning, he didn't say anything and just pushed down my raised hair. Until someone confessed to him and he refused, he sat next to me and asked me: "Who do you think I like?"
This is a story about secret love, waiting and getting closer. There is no grand confession, no bloody misunderstanding. There is only the daily life of two boys from freshman year to graduation - occupying seats, bringing meals, catching up on photos, cold wars, making up, sharing a scarf and listening to the same song on the playground bleachers, and squeezing together to keep warm on the narrow single bed in the dormitory. He hid all his cares in "by the way" and "just in case", and it took me four years to learn to believe that the spot in the lower right corner of his drawing will always be mine.
