"When you stepped over my outstretched foot that day, did you feel that I was special at all?"
Lin Wan's life has two sides -
In the daylight, she is the girl who always smiles and competes with Lu Yu: comparing grades, running, tying pigtails on the back of his head, and retorting with a red face when everyone teases him about "dressing up as a couple".
In the shadows, she is her father's drunken punching bag, her grandma's tool for "must do better than her sister in exams", and the desperate person who carves "not worthy of living" on her wrist with a knife late at night.
In her second year of junior high school, transfer student Lu Yu wore the same blue sweatshirt as hers and sat behind her. She stretched out her foot to trip him, but he stepped over easily - that was the beginning of their awkward relationship and the starting point of the last light in Lin Wan's life.
The laughter in the group of four, the subtleties at the front and back tables, the unspoken love... The brightest moments in her youth are her only weapons against the darkness.
Until high school was divided into classes, friends went abroad, rumors spread, and depression was diagnosed, but only a week's supply of medication was obtained. She tried to ask for help, but the only responses from the world were: "Don't affect your studies," "Be strong," and "It's not a big problem."
On the day when her college entrance examination scores were announced, Lin Wan put on that blue sweatshirt and jumped off the bridge with a smile.
Many years later, Lu Yu found her unsent letter in an old physics book and finally understood:
Those "awkward youths" that he thought were all her distress signals that no one heard.
It was a grand, silent fall.
About how a girl smiles in the sun but is broken in the shadows.
About those moments that we think are "just emotions" may be someone else's last ditch effort.
About if someone had asked: "Are you okay?" - Would the outcome have been different?
Intent: This is an epitaph of youth about "the unheard cry for help".
It attempts to engrave those souls that are still trembling in the sun and questions every onlooker: When a person's collapse is packaged as "youthful emotions", how should we identify the cracks under the smile?