Lu Ximei and Jiang Qichi have known each other since they were seventeen, and it has been forty-three years now.
One dropped out of the police academy and worked as a pet undertaker, wildlife photographer, and camping blogger, and finally opened a small B&B with only six rooms in a Tibetan area; the other graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, painted endangered animals, mixed scented candles, taught children to draw, and finally lived his life as a studio with people waiting for him.
It's been a year since we broke up with each other. She saved 23 voice messages without signal in her tent in no-man's land, and she wrote 47 emails that were not sent. There was no ceremony for the reconciliation, she just posted a picture on WeChat Moments, and she said "sleeping in a tent" in the comment area.
Seven years in a foreign country, a seven-hour time difference, and the chat record contains 1,300 "good mornings" and "good nights" staggered. After traveling twenty countries, she squatted under the basket of a hot-air balloon and held on to her clothes tightly. She wrapped her soaked coat back on her body at the black sand beach of Iceland.
Not lovers, not relatives, not "more than friendship".
They are two rocks in the intertidal zone. You can only see them when the tide goes out - they grow together from the bottom of the sea.
——The tide will go out, but the rocks will remain.
Intention: The deepest form of friendship is not to be entangled all the time, but to still choose to become the benchmark of each other's world after each has become a complete person. True intimacy does not require constant confirmation. The tide will recede and the rocks will grow together on the bottom of the sea. Eternal.