When we were seventeen years old, there were seventeen corridors between us, but it took us ten years to reach each other.
When we met for the first time, the provincial team recommendation form was stained with paint, and the smell of turpentine and competition certificate ink were fighting in the air. I said "it's just a competition", you said "it's just a matter of talent". At that time, we all thought that disgust was an innate instinct, like a migratory bird flying south, like the alternation of morning and dusk, and it was natural.
Later I found out that some of the accelerated heartbeats were misclassified - they were not due to anger, but due to fear. Afraid of being seen through, afraid that the true words hidden in the vicious words will come out in an inadvertent glance.
In the past ten years, we have been like two sharp knives, facing each other in examination rooms, conference rooms, courtrooms, and even in front of the refrigerator door in the same apartment. You say I am as grandiose as a circus performer, and I say you are as boring as a tombkeeper. We attack each other with the coldest legal provisions and the most difficult-to-change building codes, but in the middle of the night when no one is watching, we secretly pick up each other's torn pride and glue it together piece by piece.
It turns out that tit-for-tat is the safest code word between us.
Then I realized that on the other side of the wall, you were standing with the same scars.
And when we finally had the courage to translate those vicious words into love letters word for word, and walk the seventeen steps of the corridor as our way home for the rest of our lives, I realized:
It turns out that the best love in the world is not a natural pairing, but two people who are covered in thorns. Clumsily and stubbornly, it took ten years to finally grind themselves into each other's only gap.
Intention: Tit-for-tat is the safest code word between us