Seventeen-year-old Shen Nianqiu is a girl who grew up silently in a family that values boys over girls. Her only outlet was the sketchbook on the rooftop and the blank spaces she was dissatisfied with.
The new art teacher Lu Qingyan was transferred from the provincial capital to this ancient town in the south of the Yangtze River. He understood her blank spaces - behind those blank spaces was a girl's unspeakable loneliness, longing, and a heart waiting to be filled.
They fell in love under the moonlight, testing the edge of the forbidden cliff. However, the crime of teacher-student love is enough to crush everything. An anonymous report letter and a violent family intervention sent Lu Qingyan thousands of miles away to the west. The mother cut off all the letters, forged letters of renunciation, and forced Nianqiu into a loveless marriage.
Seven years later, Nianqiu got divorced, packed up his old schoolbag, and headed west alone. She crossed the Gobi and crossed the wilderness, and in a dilapidated rural primary school, she found the person who had made her miss her entire youth.
His hair was gray, his eyes were dim, and he no longer even remembered her name.
"The painting is so good... Who painted it?" He pointed to her award-winning painting "Blank Space" when she was seventeen and asked blankly.
She stood there, tears falling silently.
It turns out that some people are not meant to be reunited. It turned out that there was some blank space, and it was destined to remain blank forever.
This is a story about first love, waiting, disillusionment and self-reconciliation. It pays tribute to the tragic aesthetics of Qiong Yao's "Outside the Window", but gives a calmer and more contemporary answer - when the moonlight illuminates the blank space, you finally understand: the only person who can fill it is yourself.
Intention: The end of love is not reunion, but that you become your own light.