Pretend Not to See

Lin Xi once loved someone clumsily and devoutly. In her sophomore year of high school, transfer student Chen Yi sat next to her. He is silent, withdrawn, and reclusive, like an airtight wall. But Lin Xi had seen him squatting on the playground to feed a three-legged stray cat, and had seen the broken light in his eyes while sitting on the rooftop playing the harmonica. She thought that he must not be a naturally cold person. So she stuffed a bottle of milk into his desk every day, along with a note full of encouragement. She waited for him for a year, and when she was in the corridor of the graduation party, she asked with red eyes the words she had been holding back for too long: "Chen Yi, have you really... Never seen me?" He faced the light and remained silent for a long time, saying only three words—— "You don't deserve it." At the school anniversary banquet seven years later, Chen Yi stood on the podium as an outstanding alumnus. Wearing a suit and leather shoes, with all the stars holding the moon, when his eyes swept across the audience, he stopped on her for less than half a second, and then moved away as if nothing had happened. And pretended not to see. Lin Xi thought that he was immune to all poisons. But when he stopped her in the corridor and said with red eyes, "I saw you, I just didn't dare to admit it," she realized that some wounds had never healed. He said that he had spent his whole life looking for a pair of eyes that would shed tears for him. After finding it, he pushed the owner of those eyes as far away as possible. Because being close is a drag, and love is hurt. But he didn't ask her if she was afraid of being dragged down. A person who was crushed by his original family, and a person who tried his best to give him warmth. What separated them was never the distance, but the bloody self-abandonment behind his words "You're not worth it." Seven years can change a lot, but it can't change one fact - she is still where she is, and he has never really left. She was seven years late for "seeing", did she still want it? Purpose: This is a story about "mistaking self-abandonment for protection". The male protagonist Chen Yi grew up in the shadow of long-term domestic violence and his mother's suicide. The self-loathing deeply rooted in his bones caused him to misunderstand "pushing away" as the deepest love. The heroine Lin Xi has developed a pleaser personality in a single-parent family, and regards "being needed" as the entire source of self-worth. Two people who don't know how to love healthily meet at the most sensitive age of youth. One tries desperately to get closer and the other tries harder to push away. In the end, they grow up in the tempering of time, learn to look directly at each other's brokenness, and learn to reconcile with their own trauma.