Lime’s Sweet Aftertaste

Do you know what a green lime tastes like? Mu Ju does! Mu Ju took her first bite of a green lime one summer when she was seven. Its sour bitterness spread across her tongue, like all the things she couldn’t say aloud in her youth. Back then, she thought youth was a piece of lemon candy that never ran out, sweet and sour in her mouth, too precious to swallow. Then she grew up. She wrote those names into game scripts, spun them into stories, and let virtual characters love in her place. She thought that was all youth could be: like a green lime squeezed dry, nothing left but a wrinkled peel tossed into the trash, forgotten by everyone. Until one afternoon, she pushed open the door to an old classroom. A boy stood at the lectern. When he looked her way, their eyes met. And in their eyes was... each other. A secret crush is never just one person’s frantic turmoil. Mu Ju and Jing Xuzhi were each other’s memories of their school days. The green lime of Mu Ju’s youth had finally ripened. Jing Xuzhi held a green lime in his hand and smiled at her. In that moment, she suddenly understood. Green limes aren’t sour to make you frown. They remind you that life tastes like a succession of sour and sweet. The things she had been too afraid to say when she bit into that lime at seven could now be told to others with a smile. The people we thought we’d lost along the way had been waiting all along at a bend in time. All you have to do is look back, and you’ll see him standing there. Light on his shoulders, you in his eyes. A green lime’s journey, from sour to sweet, from bitter to mellow. That’s youth. That’s you. That’s me, too.