When Loquat Is Ripe

In the autumn when Yu Yining was thirty-eight years old, he met Song Yunan in a bar in Jing'an Temple. She was in a bad mood, sitting alone in the corner of the bar drinking whiskey. He came over, wearing a white T-shirt and his ears were red to the roots, and asked her if she could buy him a drink. She pinched his chin and turned it left and right, thinking that the boy was quite good-looking. It was the first time she had laughed in a long time. Later she took him to a hotel. The next morning I left five hundred dollars on the bedside table, put on my high heels and left without looking back. She thought that was the end of the matter. The half-day vacation an adult takes for himself between working days does not require follow-up and is meaningless. But the boy chased him from the office building of Zhangjiang Hi-Tech to under the loquat tree of his old house in Jiading, and passed through the layers of conditions she set one by one. He said I won't run. She said it was just for fun and it would end at any time. He agreed with red eyes, and then spent nearly two years convincing her that if he said he wouldn't run, he really wouldn't run. At the same time, her sister Yu Yixi is also experiencing a relationship that she is not optimistic about. Thirty-two years old, divorced, with an eight-year-old daughter, Coco, who has been pampered by her father for most of her life, treating love as a pastime. Until a college student named Lin Zhiying appeared at the gate of the elementary school. She almost hit a telephone pole after taking one look at her. He was timid, reserved, and allergic to cat hair, but he handed her a tissue when she was holding the cat and crying, and said "I won't leave" to her in the alley. The secret she had hidden for many years - Keke was not her ex-husband Chen Yue's biological child - was spilled while drunk. He heard it, was silent for a long time, and then said: I don't want to fall in love with your secret, I want to fall in love with you. An orange cat named Fatty witnessed all this. It jumped on Song Yunan's lap from the first meeting and made decisions for everyone in a cat's way. The glass of wine that started in the Jing'an Temple bar, passed through the scorching sun at Zhangjiang Hi-Tech, the fallen leaves on Wutong Road at Jiaotong University, countless late-night phone calls between Beijing and Shanghai, passed through a cat's down vest and a silver ring without any pattern, and finally arrived under the loquat tree in the yard of the old house in Jiading. It started out as fun and ended up being serious. It started with five hundred yuan and ended with a home. Intent: This is a story about "disbelief" and "belief". Yu Yining lived for thirty-eight years and developed exquisite egoism. She manages her feelings as a project and treats her relationship as a risk assessment, leaving herself enough escape routes - it's just for fun and can end at any time. She thought those conditions were armor, but they were actually locks. Song Yunan spent nearly two years without a key, just knocking on the door over and over again until she opened the lock herself from the inside. Yu Yixi took longer. She started messing up everything at the age of twenty and used the label "scumbag" because as long as she admitted these two words first, others could not use them to scold her. She thought this would be it for the rest of her life. Until a boy wearing glasses stood in the alley and said to her: You are not a scumbag, you just haven't been well liked. This is also a story about "proof". Song Yunan has been doing one thing since the day he was humiliated by five hundred yuan - to prove that he is not someone who can be dismissed casually. He waited all day downstairs in Zhangjiang, handwritten two hundred pages of code as a birthday gift, and sent his old coat back to Xuzhou for his mother to change into a down vest for cats. Every word he said came true. Lin Zhiying has been doing the same thing from the beginning. He sneezed twenty-three times and it still came every time. He was afraid of fire and even bought fireworks. He said "let's go" in front of a strange woman in the science and technology museum. He said "I won't leave" - ​​not because she was good, but because he chose her, and every day he proved that this choice was right. This is also a story about "home". The loquat tree in the old house in Jiading has witnessed everything. Some people were recognized by cats for the first time under the tree, some people took a package of dried osmanthus flowers under the tree and said they would come back in October, some people exchanged plain silver rings under the tree, and some people said they would celebrate their birthdays here every year in the future. It took nearly two years to walk from the 500 yuan in the Jing'an Temple bar to the string lights filling the yard of the old house in Jiading. Not finally – but continuing. It started out as fun and ended up being serious. It started with a night of drinking alone and ended with the laughter of a whole yard of people. It started with disbelief, and finally there was no need to make a wish—because everything you wanted was already in the yard.