I Collected a Twenty-Year-Old Love Letter for Someone Else

When he woke up, Chen Xiaoxiao found a brown paper envelope under his pillow. It contains 37,400 yuan in cash, nine bank cards that have been saved for 20 years, and 37 love letters tied with red silk thread - the recipient of all letters is a girl named "Xiaoxiao", written from the age of ten to thirty-five, with neat handwriting and full of infatuation. But Chen Xiaoxiao knew that the person who had been deeply loved for twenty-five years was not her. She is just an ordinary woman who is married and has children. Her husband, Zhou, drives a van and runs freight. Her daughter, Nannan, is only one and a half years old. Her daily life consists of changing diapers, making milk powder, and chatting with the landlady in front of the rice cake shop downstairs. At the same time, she had a recurring dream. In her dream, she walked along a stream flowing southward into a brightly lit night market, where everything was sold except milk tea. She set up a stall to fry glutinous rice dumplings, and her skills were poor. The man selling pancakes next to her helped her knead the dough, adjust the heat, and taught her how to fry the glutinous rice dumplings until they were not burnt or falling apart. After the night market, there were free dinners, free movies, and free wine. She almost crossed the line when she was tipsy, but at the last moment, she remembered her daughter who was waiting to change her diaper at home, and fled in a hurry. The man chased her and said that he could find her by following the "smell of the stream" on her body without adding WeChat - the sweetness of rice cakes, the astringency of locust leaves, the fishy smell of baby milk powder, and all the smells of a home. Reality and dreams gradually overlap. The man selling pancakes is called "Lin". He has been writing love letters for twenty years and has saved half his life's savings, but he has never sent the letters. Finally, he entrusted everything to a shoe repairman and found it under Chen Xiaoxiao's pillow. When she found the answer under the banyan tree in the provincial capital that was knocked down by the typhoon and then raised up, she realized that the man waiting there had turned into a tree, and she had long been firmly nailed to the world by something heavier and more stable - the clumsy care of her husband, Lao Zhou, the little fist that held her fingers tightly, and the peeled hard-boiled egg on the hot porridge every morning. This is a story about infatuation and sobriety, fantasy and responsibility. That stream flows southward, to a place where there are always people waiting, and there are always people writing unsendable letters. Chen Xiaoxiao stood on the shore and waved, then turned back to change the child's diaper. Because she knows that the best love letter in the world is written to a person who can live a good life. That love letter didn't have to be sent, it would have arrived as long as she was doing well. Intention: True deep love is not a vigorous pursuit, but living as an anchor in the daily trivialities - firmly fixing another person in the world. The strength of a woman is not that she refuses temptation, but that she still chooses to go back home to breastfeed her child even though she knows there is a more beautiful scenery outside. A man's responsibility is not material wealth, but the clumsiness of hanging his hands in the air and not knowing where to put them when his wife is crying. Life forces you to move forward, but love makes you willing to stop.