When Wan Tang was eight years old, she met Gu Changan in Wutong Lane. He broke his knee, and she pressed the trousseau handkerchief embroidered with orchids on his wound.
From gardenias to sour plum candy, from "The Little Prince" to plain silver rings, they spent their entire youth falling in love. He was admitted to the Maritime University, and she was waiting under the plane tree; he drew a transfer map from Shanghai to Tongcheng, and he could walk back with his eyes closed. Green plum wine at the age of sixteen, a marriage certificate at the age of twenty-two, and a small sycamore tree just planted in the yard - the good days seemed like they would never end.
But the sycamore leaves turn yellow year after year, and some people fall apart as they walk.
Wan Tang returned to Wutong Lane in the autumn when he was thirty-five. The old trees at the entrance of the alley are still there, the bluestone slabs are still there, and the little girl squatting on the ground picking leaves is still growing one after another. She wrote more than twenty years of longing into the wind, put the two rings into her palms, and gently left those unfinished words under the golden leaves on the ground.
This is a story about waiting, loss, parting and rebirth, about how a person learns to make peace with all the yesterdays that he has no time to say goodbye to in the rustle of time.
Intention: Parting is not the end, forgetting is. And those who have been loved well will turn into a person's long-lasting warmth and accompany her through all the seasons of the rest of her life.