I met him on a night train in Northern Europe.
"I owe you a reply, and now I can finally hand it to you in person."
In summer, when the sun's direct point moves northward, the humid wind blowing from the Atlantic Ocean makes people feel like they are in a huge incubator. There was a pool of clean water under his eyes. I looked at him, and memories came out wetly.
"Who is Lu Minli?"
It was probably at that moment that a straight line wanted to change its inclination to intersect another straight line.
"Matches?"
"Yeah, that's what happens."
In that summer that was throbbing in every corner of the campus, in the unwatched movies, in the corridors at dusk, before the street lights went out, I didn't even count my heartbeats.
"Youth is something that doesn't consider the future."
I didn't tell him that at that crowded band performance, I counted the minutes and seconds of the music for him from a long distance away; it would take a long time for me to find out that someone had secretly recorded the dancing figure in the dark auditorium.
"Jiang Ling."
"Yeah."
"Let's go see Jiang."
Those nights when the lights couldn't last, the words and sentences I wrote over and over again, and the geometric models that still couldn't be solved even when they appeared in my dreams, seemed to have been faded into circles of water waves. We are pushed forward by time, but seventeen-year-old Lu Minli was left behind on that first snowy winter day, waiting for the moment when the ice melted and the rivers came into spring.
"No different than seventeen-year-old Lu Minli, I would still say:
Jiang Ling, nice to meet you. "
Intention: Young people's two-way rush and common growth