The glass greenhouse in early spring is always full of ice, just like my declared sexual orientation - the perfect straight girl Lin Xincheng, I never thought that I would be smashed into Shen Yingying's amber pupils.
As a top student in the Department of Horticulture, I joined the LGBTQ community with a calm mind of dissecting the male and female stamens of plants. Until that wet rainy day, Yingying, who always wore black-rimmed glasses, suddenly took off the frames and asked me to help her wipe away the fog from her lenses. The moment my fingertips touched her eyelashes, I heard butterflies flapping their wings in the hibernating ventricle of my heart.
"Did you know that the red jade vine must be entangled with two female plants to bloom?" She pressed the grafting knife against my tiger's mouth, and the vine-like breath climbed up to my earlobes. The night the fireflies we cultivated bloomed in the dark room, she taught me how to identify hermaphroditism in plants that had been erased from textbooks. The pollen stained the hollow of her collarbone looked like a Sahara star map.
When rumors spread like powdery mildew to campus forums, I tremblingly poured anti-frost agent on the moonlight moss Yingying gave me. But she used a microscope slide to hold the melted snow and taught me how to observe how ice crystals crack into hexagonal shapes: "Homophobic people will never understand that every edge of the snowflake hides a rainbow that is forgiven by the sun."
Purpose: Break the ice of sexual orientation regulations and let love, like wild plants, grow freely according to genetic instincts.