May 20, 2006, heavy rain. Fifteen-year-old Shen Zhi hid in an abandoned art museum and met Lu Yu, a 22-year-old resident singer. He put the last gardenia on the window sill behind her ear and said, "The way you stand in the light is like an unfinished oil painting." He sang a song that day called "How can you let me be sad?" Little did she know that she would listen to this song for the rest of her life.
She was fifteen and he was twenty-two, a difference of seven years. What distance is seven years old? It was the window sill that she couldn't reach, the adulthood that he couldn't wait for, and the river that stretched between them for fourteen years.
He took her for a ride in his racing car. The wind was so strong that she couldn't open her eyes. She could only hear him singing various love songs, one after another to her alone. He gave her the first box of professional paints and the first pair of gardenia silver earrings. He kissed her forehead on her sixteenth birthday and said, "Wait until you grow up." She thought "growing up" was a destination that could be reached. Later I learned that "growing up" was a train that could never catch up with him.
He was forced to leave and left a note: "Seven years. I was thirty and you were twenty-two. If I can still sing and you can draw me, we will owe nothing to the other."
Seven years. He got married and divorced, she fell in love and broke up again. He became an independent musician, and she went from corpse makeup artist to film and television special effects makeup. Reunited seven years later, he crashes onto her set riding a second-hand race car with a guitar strapped to the back. He said: "In seven years, Gardenia has bloomed seven times, and I'm still singing."
They finally moved in together. He gets up at 5:30 every day and cooks fermented glutinous rice dumplings for her. He stands behind her and holds her hands when she puts on eyeliner and her hands are shaking. On rainy days, he plays the intro to "Hey Jude". In the early hours of the morning, when she has insomnia, he hums a sleep-inducing song without words. He wrote a hundred songs but dared not publish any of them because "each one is not good enough - you are better than all the lyrics." It was so sweet that everyone thought they were finally going to the end.
But he hid a song for fourteen years. The last line of the lyrics is: "Your fifteen-year-old eyes, my thirty-year-old disease. It's just one step away from reaching it, and it's a lifetime away from admitting it."
He died on the day of her wedding when she was twenty-nine. The epitaph was engraved with the words he sang all his life: "I am the one who loves you most, don't be sad." She finished saying "I do" in her wedding dress, and the news of his death lay on her phone. She played the demo of "Gardenia Is Gone" over and over again in the empty concert hall, until only his voice echoed in the entire venue.
Fourteen years. A gardenia blooms and fades. A song starts from singing to stopping. A person falls in love from the age of fifteen to the age of twenty-nine, and finally discovers that some people are meant to be missed.
But she said: "I have painted three thousand faces. There is only one face that I have not finished painting for fourteen years."
There are lights on the other side, but there are no ferries on the river. She stands on this side and he stands on the other side. The distance of seven years, the time of fourteen years, a song that can never be finished.
"The person who loves you the most is me - how can you let me be sad?"
——He is willing. Because it's the only thing he can do for her.
Intention: When she met him at the age of fifteen, she thought seven years was a distance; when he left her at the age of twenty-nine, she realized that seven years was fate. He spent his whole life painting a picture for her, and the name of the painting was "Missed".
