"I love you baby."
When Xu Mingquan said this for the hundred and eighth time, Wei Xun was counting the cracks in the bathtub tiles.
The forty-seventh crack was the longest, like a new wound on his wrist.
Wei Xun's world has long faded into black and white.
Depression is not an emotion, it is a 24-hour non-stop tsunami that pushes him into the depths of the bathtub over and over again.
And Xu Mingquan, the man who appears every day with sunflowers and a smile, is the only bright but distorted color in his world.
"Your love is too noisy." Wei Xun thought, "It's like background music that can't cover up the sound of me wanting to die."
Until that day, the music stopped suddenly.
Xu Mingquan hummed a song to deliver freshly picked roses, but no one answered the door.
When he turned to leave, there was a heavy muffled sound in the room - like a body hitting the floor, like a corner of the world collapsing.
He kicked open the door.
The water in the bathtub is reddish. Wei Xun curled up on the tiles, the open wounds on his wrists looked like mocking mouths.
The most dazzling thing was the flash of relief in Wei Xun's gray eyes when he looked up at him.
"Wei Xun——!"
Xu Mingquan rushed over, his hands shaking so much that he couldn't cover the blood.
Only then did he clearly see the layers of old scars on Wei Xun's arms, like a diary filled with pain.
And the "I love you" he says every day has never been written into any page.
When the red light in the emergency room turned on, Xu Mingquan punched the wall.
He thought he was saving, but he didn't even notice that the other person was drowning.
This is just the first time.
Then came the second time: Wei Xun swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills and was dragged back from the brink of death.
The third time: Wei Xun stood on the edge of the rooftop, turned around and said softly to him, "Don't chase him this time."
The fourth time, the fifth time...
Every rescue operation was like digging a hole in Xu Mingquan's heart.
He learned to recognize the different grays in Wei Xun's eyes - the gray of despair, the gray of numbness, the gray of wishing for death.
He learned to deliver sunflowers while hiding all the knives and medicine bottles in the house.
He learns not to say "I love you" but to say "I am."
But Wei Xun is still broken.
Piece by piece, silently.
"Xu Mingquan, are you tired?" Wei Xun asked one time when he was awake, his eyes vacant, "Let go, I can't sew well."
Xu Mingquan held his bandaged wrist and pressed his forehead against it.
"I'm not patching you up."
I am learning how to love a crumbling ruin. "
Charming, world-weary, depressed beauty is attacked by a loyal dog named Sunshine
Purpose: redemption
