Hefei Dating Algorithm

Zhou Mi was certain she was straight.

Until Feng Shuyi came along, the woman who would turn off her alarm in the middle of the night,

modify her temperature-controlled power bank,

and draw a little cartoon bee in the corner of a note attached to her brown-sugar ginger tea.

With one line, "Honey won't make the code crash," she brought down every "I thought" Zhou Mi had clung to for twenty-three years.

Hefei's summer was long, the cicadas singing like rain.

Among the osmanthus fragrance of the old shops on Lei Street,

in the sunset shimmer over Chaohu Lake,

and in the unspoken stories of "sworn sisters" at Xiaoyaojin Park,

the two of them slowly, clumsily,

compiled a romance neither had ever seen coming.

"On an afternoon when honey drips into coffee, there's an amber autumn in your eyes."

"I wanted to write code that would never crash, but you had already compiled me into the sweetest bug, looping endlessly deep inside the System."

- Music by Feng Shuyi, poem by Zhou Mi, witnessed by Hefei

Theme: "I wanted to write code that would never crash, but you had already compiled me into the sweetest bug, looping endlessly deep inside the System."