Lin Xiaoyu could hear seventeen decibels of silence in his right ear.
When the sounds of the world receded from her life like a tide, she built a sound museum in her sketchbook: the frequency of raindrops, the amplitude of the sparrow's wings, the wavelength of chalk crossing the blackboard... And all the blank spaces in youth that were unable to speak.
Until Chen Feng appeared - the transfer student who pointed at the sky at the end of the corridor and could predict where the raindrops would fall in fifteen minutes.
He said: "The wind has a shape, the rain has fingerprints, and the clouds are diaries that move."
He said: "The noise of electricity you hear may be thunder in the distance writing a letter."
He takes her into the abandoned weather station on the top floor and teaches her to read the language of the wind and decipher the code of the clouds. In this world where everyone advised her to "learn to adapt to silence", he was the only one who said:
"I'll listen for you."
They exchanged their thoughts in weather forecast books, recorded frequencies that only two of them could decode during heavy rains, and wrote weather data more romantic than love letters in each other's observation logs.
But the curve on the audiometer continued to fall, the red list of competition recommendations was dazzling, and the training notice from Beijing arrived at the same time as the university brochure from Nanjing - he belonged to the broader sky, while she was sinking into deeper silence.
"If one day I forget what the sound of rain sounds like..."
The boy gently placed her hand on his throat, letting the vibrations of his vocal cords pass along the bones:
"This is my voice, remember this frequency."
"Whether I am in a storm in Antarctica or on an observatory in Beijing - as long as you are here, there will always be a clear echo in my world."
Intention: Not "I love you despite your imperfections", but "Your differences allow me to see a more complete universe"