Summer insects cannot talk to the ice, but they are devoted to the time.
Su Xiu has been accustomed to reading in a corner since she was a child. The walls are cold and the pages of the book are warm. She has lived like this alone for many years. Until the day when she was assigned to the first grade of high school, Xu Manling walked in wearing a dark green dress, and her amber eyes walked through the entire classroom and walked to her side.
"Can I sit here?"
From then on, Su Xiu's left side was no longer a cold wall. They shared the same pair of headphones and shared a candle during evening self-study during the power outage. Xu Manling held her hand and said, "Did you know that your fingers are like stained glass?" Su Xiu thought this was eternity - the two weirdos took each other as a refuge and bloomed secretly in the gaps of the world.
Later, a boy in a white shirt appeared at the other end of the playground. Wu Jianjian's eyes passed through the gaps in the sycamore leaves, through the afternoon heat wave, through the hustle and bustle of the entire campus, and landed on Su Xiu's lowered eyelashes. They didn't speak. But they used the distance of an entire corridor, countless casual corners, and the chirping of cicadas throughout the summer to complete a youthful and ignorant dialogue.
"You've been in a daze lately." Xu Manling said, twisting Su Xiu's school uniform tie with her fingers. Her voice was very soft, as soft as the cicada chirping in the hottest summer.
"You know? When you are in a daze, all the boys in the grade are looking at you."
Su Xiu didn't know what was happening in Wu Jianjian's world, she didn't know what was hidden in Xu Manling's silence, and she didn't know where the rumors coming from all directions would push them. All she knew was that this was the only summer she would ever have. The cicadas chirped deafeningly. They sat on the steps, and the wind blew the sweet-scented osmanthus all over their bodies. Someone held her hand and said, Su Xiu, you are not alone now.
Su Xiu believed it. She really believed it.
But summer will always end, and the sound of cicadas will stop. They will eventually go to different winters. Many years later, she opened an old book on a snowy night in a foreign land and saw a light blue paper clip sandwiched on a certain page. There were no cicadas chirping outside the window, only snow falling silently. She suddenly remembered what Xu Manling once asked -
"What if Xia Chong wants to hear it?"
She thought. She always wanted to. It was only when she lived until winter that she truly understood what ice was.
And the cicadas chirping in the summer had finished shouting out all the unspeakable words for her.
Concept: Xia Cicada Ming