One Summer

Xu Xia's seventeenth year began with a black garbage bag. She lives on the top floor of a self-built house that was built illegally and has to bring a basin to collect water when it rains. Her mother, Xu Anying, filled her leaky balcony with green plants and said, "It's better to water the flowers than let the rainwater go to waste." This woman, who turned poverty into a romance, taught her daughter the only thing - you can't escape life, but you can choose how to look at it. So that evening when the basketball hit her face, Xu Xia subconsciously said, "It's okay, it's okay." She is used to not bothering others. But the young man named Lin Yang didn't leave. He took her to the drugstore to buy an ice pack and said, "You treat me to a ball, and I treat you to an ice pack - it's even." She didn't know that this "event" would become the most tender debt between them in the years to come. They fell in love in the same class, kissed in the alley, and embraced each other in a rental house on a rainy night. He called her "Xia Xia" and tilted his head to reveal two tiger teeth; she collected every loquat he gave and every ice pack that turned into water. They all thought that summer would never end - until Lin Yang's mother passed away suddenly, until he went to Yunnan alone to pick up his mother and go home, until that summer vacation, something quietly changed over thousands of kilometers away. Lin Yang, who came back from Yunnan, walked out of the station with a cigarette in his mouth, took the birthday gift from her hand, and said "thank you." He no longer tilted his head and called her "Xia Xia", and no longer followed her silently after evening study hall. He wrote her name in her register, walked through everyone at the KTV graduation party, and raised a bottle of wine towards her. They clinked glasses and finished the bottle. Then he sent a friend request: "Can we reconcile?" She failed. Many years later, Xu Xia smelled the familiar scent of soap from a strange boy in the university library. At that moment, sixteen-year-old Xia Tian overlapped with the light and shadow in front of her. She finally understood - some love doesn't have to go to the end. The boy with crooked eyebrows stayed under the loquat tree forever, and she learned to move forward on her own with the light he gave her. This is a story about loss and growth. It's about how two teenagers who were prematurely hurt by life left eternal marks on each other, and how they took these marks to become adults who can love. That summer was short. Short enough to say "even" only once. That summer was long. The evening breeze that has grown to seventeen years old has not stopped blowing for so many years. Intention: Intention: How does a young man who has been treated poorly by life identify himself in love, and how does he grow into a person who can love despite his wounds. Xu Xia was abandoned in front of the Xia family at the age of five, and Lin Yang lost his mother at a young age. She was used to hiding red garbage bags, and he learned to walk into the station with a cigarette in his mouth. They once thought that falling in love was saving each other - in a leaky rental house, in front of the mourning hall in Yunnan, deep in the alley at the age of sixteen. But to truly grow up is to finally understand: love is not about leaving the wound to the other person for safekeeping, but to bandage it up and then reach out. The boy with crooked eyebrows finally stayed under the loquat tree. And with the light he gave her, she learned not to wait for others to love, but to become the one to love herself.