In the summer when I was seventeen, a young boy who played the piano moved downstairs.
Cheng Huan never thought that the sound of a piano leaking in through the crack in the door would become a memory he would chew on over the long years to come. Everything about that summer - the temperature of the river, the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves of the poplar trees, the moment when the sunset burned the sky orange, and the profile of the man sitting on the piano bench with his head bowed - were carefully stored away by him and kept in his heart, like a stamp that would never be mailed.
Then summer ended. The boy left. The agreement ran aground.
Cheng Huan thought that was the end of the story. He went to class and exams as usual, suffered from insomnia, and woke up at four in the morning to observe the color of the sky and the tone of the wind. He learned to lie in the dark, waiting for daybreak, and learned not to ask what the increasingly shorter replies meant.
But the story doesn't end there.
It just keeps flowing like the river out of sight. When the next summer comes, it will overflow the banks again, carrying all the undercurrents accumulated during the ice period.
Intention: Love can't cure everything, but it can accompany you for a while. You have to walk the rest of the way on your own.
