1997, Southwest Mountain City. Xia Hanxi, an intern nurse at the medical school, and Wu Yanqing, an environmental engineering technician, fell in love at a glance at a newsstand. The red electric lights in the rental house, the whistle at the train station, and the moonlight in Zhuzhou warmed the two young hearts. However, due to organizational obsession, geographical distance, family barriers and their own frailties, they became separated in the "one step away".
For the next twenty-eight years, she was trapped in a loveless marriage, surrounded by rumors, divorced, remarried, and left alone with her baby. She worked her way from the township health center to the provincial capital; he started from scratch in Zhuzhou and became famous, and both of them kept their deep feelings deep in their hearts. She wrote poems to overcome her longing, and he hid his old things alone for a long night. In 2025, a heart stent opened up her clogged blood vessels and gave her the courage to travel thousands of miles to say goodbye. One phone call, fifty-five minutes, and the agreement to "talk again in twenty years" became the last tenderness between the two.
In 2047, there was mist and rain in the south of the Yangtze River, and in 2045, there was light snow in Zhuzhou. They passed away one after another with their secrets. When the children were sorting out their belongings, they regarded the iron and wooden boxes as cumbersome and threw them away or forgotten them. Those deep feelings buried by the years are like the lonely shadow deep in the fallen flowers, no one knows.
Intention: In this life, the greatest courage is not to rush, but to restrain; the deepest possession is not to stay together, but to remember; the most true affection is not to be announced to the public, but to be taken to the grave.
With a span of half a century, the novel describes the most forbearing, longest-lasting, most useless but most touching kind of Eastern emotion - never stopping loving you, but never bothering you.