Many people asked me why I wrote more than 10,000 words in the opening chapter about the start of school. But if you look closely, it only took half a day from the time Tang Haoyu was woken up by the alarm clock to the time he played the last ball in the volleyball hall.
Yes, this is the "realism" I want to write about.
This is not the kind of cool story that starts with "the domineering school bully falls in love with me", nor does it have so many dramatic coincidences. Every detail here has a shadow of my student days: the shortcut to Qixia Bridge that I took to avoid being late, the heat wave that sticks to my skin in mid-summer in September, and the group of buddies on the court who call you "idiot" while filling in for you at critical moments.
Tang Haoyu in the book is based on my high school classmate who always liked to sleep in; Li Zihao's lob was a "dirty trick" we actually used during school team training; even the pink Sakura Band-Aid was a heart-stopping moment I glimpsed in a girl's pencil case.
I broke down these ten minutes and wrote them slowly because youth is originally composed of countless "slow motions". We will care about what is missing from our trouser pockets, we will remember the dull pain of being hit on the cheek by a ball, and we will also secretly hide a certain name in our hearts amidst the cheers of our brothers.
This book is a love letter I wrote to my sophomore year in high school that I can never get back. It's not perfect, it's even a bit long-winded, but it's true. I hope you can slow down and take another look with me at the noisy September 1st.
If you don't like it, don't spray it, thank you.
Intention: This is not a cool article, it is a slow letter I wrote to my sophomore year in high school.
What I want to write is not the ups and downs of the plot, but the realities that we ignore: the alleys we walked through in order not to be late, the swollen face on the court, and the band-aid in the trouser pocket that has nowhere to put.
I hope to use these ten minutes of slow motion to take you back to September 1st, when cicadas were chirping noisily. If you can also see the shadow of your own student days in it, then this half-day of hard work will have meaning.