The Fleeting Time Before Unpacking

The first time I met Yu was in the classroom of the first year of high school. Like an eternal flame, she burst open the front door with her textbooks in her arms, her hair still covered with osmanthus petals in autumn. I was lying by the window in a daze, watching her staggeringly pile the books into a hill. Suddenly she grinned at me, showing a playful tiger tooth: "Hello, deskmate, my name is Yu." At that time, I always drew her silhouette in my sketchbook. When she couldn't solve a math problem, she would bite the cap of her pen, and her eyelashes would cast fan-shaped shadows under her eyes; she would always be frustrated when running in gym class, but she would still show off her back teeth when she yawned, and even the back molars exposed when she yawned became the shape that I repeatedly traced with the tip of my pencil. "Yao, what are you drawing again?" She suddenly came over and her warm breath brushed the tip of my ear. I hurriedly closed the book, but her eyes quickly moved away. When she saw the page, she let out an exaggerated exclamation: "Wow, Haruka, you painted me like a star!" I clutched the hem of my school uniform tightly, my throat felt like a ball of water-soaked cotton: "Because... You are very beautiful." She smiled and ruffled my hair: "Are you shy, the little painter? Next time, help me draw a photo with the seniors of the basketball club!" The sunset that evening was particularly red, dyeing the side of her face the color of orange soda. I looked at her finger pointing towards the court, and suddenly I wanted to hold the hot fingertips and tell her that what I painted was never scenery. The night before our senior year of high school graduation, we were watching the stars on the playground. She leaned on my shoulder and burped, and there was a faint smell of beer on her body. I don't know where the courage came from. I took out the handwritten letter that I had hidden for three years. The handwriting blurred into a blurry cloud in the moonlight: "Actually, I..." "Yao, do you know?" She suddenly sat up straight, her eyes as bright as the Milky Way, "I plan to go to Beijing to study photography! What about you, do you want to stay here and study at the normal school?" The letter trembled gently in the night wind, like a butterfly that wanted to spread its wings but had a broken beak. I heard myself saying: "Well, that's good." She lay back again, pointed at Orion and babbled: "In the future, I want to take pictures of sunrises all over the world. If you become a teacher, remember to post my photo on the back wall of the classroom." I counted her breaths, and when I reached the 37th, I folded the letter into a paper boat and put it into the pond on the playground. The moonlight drifted the paper boat into a pale moon, carrying the unspoken "I like you" and sinking into the invisible abyss. We met again at a convenience store three years later. She was wearing frayed jeans and an old camera hanging around her neck. "Haruka!" She waved at me while holding up a can of Coke, and picked out a strand of silvery hair at the end of her hair. "I never thought you would work here. That little crybaby who was even afraid of caterpillars turned out to be an adult who can work the night shift!" I paid her the bill and watched her unpacking the oden at the cashier. The steam blurred her face, but it couldn't cover the beating light in her eyes: "I just came back from Qinghai, and I took pictures of the super beautiful starry sky! By the way, do you have a boyfriend? Last time, my mother said she wanted to introduce him to me——" "Yu." I interrupted her, my fingertips trembling slightly on the cash register, "When I was in high school, I wrote you a letter..." She burst out laughing while biting the carrot: "Ah! Of course I remember it. You actually said, 'You want to raise a calico cat with me.' At that time, I thought you were playing some kind of literary joke!" She reached out and poked my eyebrows, "But to be honest, when I save enough money, we can really rent a cat together!" The wind in the refrigerator suddenly became very cold, which made my eyes sore. It turns out that some words, once expired, will become expired soda forever. She didn't know that on the back of that line, there was a truth written in pencil that even she didn't dare to face: "I want to raise a calico cat with you, I want to watch the sunrise and sunset with you, I want to spend a long life with you." Purpose: campus