Paper Clip

When Jiang Yang was fourteen, she patted Xu Que's butt. This was their first acquaintance. At that time, she didn't know what lesbianism meant. She just thought this cold-faced girl was funny and would make her angry for a long time, so she got more involved with her - bickering, being clingy, and sharing everything, like a piece of dog-skin plaster that couldn't be shaken off. Xu said, "You are sick." Jiang Yang smiled: "Yes, do you have any medicine?" Later, Jiangyang found out that it was indeed him who was sick. The heckling in high school was like a prophecy, bringing out all the inexplicable possessiveness. She started to be nice to Xu Que, so nice that she was heartbroken, and so nice that she took it for granted—asking her to dinner, waiting for her to finish class, taking photos of the clouds and sunsets every day and sending them to her. She thought this was called probation. She didn't know it was pursuit. But Xu Que's attitude alternated between hot and cold, like a shadow that he couldn't grasp. Jiangyang chased that shadow for three years, until he was exhausted, and finally understood that in this relationship, there was only one person pulling the rope from beginning to end. After the college entrance examination, the two went to different universities. The contact was intermittent, and occasionally Xu Que would take the initiative to send messages, but Jiangyang no longer dared to answer them. The questions of those years finally have answers: "Can we always be friends?" At that time, Jiangyang didn't dare to ask for too much, so she only dared to ask: ——"Let it go." It turns out that such a thing as fate cannot be sustained by one person. One day later, Jiangyang suddenly felt relieved. She wrote these years into a novel, about that summer, about those passionate efforts, and about a shadow that could not be covered with heat. In the story, someone asked her if she regretted it. She thought for a while and wrote: "I don't regret liking her." "It's just that from now on, I really just let it happen." —— A paper clip is a thing that holds two pieces of paper together. They look closely connected and intimate. But with a slight twitch, they separated. Leave no trace behind. The two pieces of paper returned to their respective places, as if they had never been sandwiched together. Very much like them. They were inseparable in junior high school, flirted with each other in high school, and drifted apart after college. Jiangyang thought that their relationship was "sandwiched together" and that those years were enough to bind the two of them. But in the end, she discovered that she was just the paper clip--she clamped the two pieces of paper hard, thinking she was holding something together. But what really determines whether two pieces of paper can be together is never the paper clip. It's the paper itself. Xu was the one who "didn't want to be caught" from the beginning. She didn't use any force, she didn't hold back, and she didn't think about sticking with anyone. It was Jiangyang who kept clamping, kept exerting force, and kept maintaining that "seemingly intimate" state. So when Jiangyang finally let go—— The two pieces of paper returned to their original positions. It's like we've never been together before. And those years of love, waiting, questioning, disappointment, those sparks that bloomed and died, died and bloomed again, in the end there was only one name left: Paperclip. A cheap piece of stationery. A self-righteous relationship. One that is clamped hard and falls off with a gentle pull—— Youth. Concept: Jiang Yang once thought that he was a paper clip, and the meaning of his existence was to tightly clamp her and Xu Que's youth. Later she realized that she was never a tool, she was an independent piece of paper. It was only in those years that she bent herself into the shape of a paper clip, bending down to reach another person. The ending of the story is not that she lost Xu Que. It was she who flattened herself again.