If There Is an Afterlife, I Hope It Will Still Be You

The blazing sunshine in September burned the asphalt pavement of Qingchuan Middle School, and the roar of the red Kawasaki H2R tore through the calm of the first day of school. When the transfer student Lin Xi supported the heavy motorcycle on one foot and parked it in the carport, Jiang Yan was wiping his black Suzuki Hayabusa in the shadows. This boy, whose parents had died and was living with his grandmother, still had oil from the gearbox repaired last night on his overalls. The moment the exhaust pipes of the two motorcycles almost collided, the gears of fate began to mesh. In physics class, Lin Xi pulled Jiang Yan's school uniform filled with equations and pointed his fingertips at the direction of the inertial force he had missed. Under the overpass at dusk, their motorcycles chased each other's shadows cast on the bridge pillars amidst the roar of the train. The torn family photo in her schoolbag still has violet embroidery, and the faded woolen bear on his car key shakes his grandmother's concern. When Lin Xi snuffed out her cell phone amidst the curses from her stepmother who called her to urge her to make up lessons for her younger brother, Jiang Yan was folding the notice from the hospital that her grandmother was critically ill into a paper airplane and throwing it from the roof of the teaching building into the howling wind. Centrifuges in chemistry laboratories have become a new battlefield. Lin Xi adjusted the speed to a dangerous 12,000 rpm. The moment the copper sulfate solution splashed into a star map, Jiang Yan's oil-stained fingers pressed the emergency stop button. At dusk when she was forced to wash the glassware, she discovered that the old scar on his shoulder blade coincided with the tear line in her family photo, and his hand applying ointment was shaking—when the stepmother's smashed ceramic cup scratched her calf last night, he was in the emergency room guarding her grandma's ventilator. "Death is a function with a constant slope." Jiang Yan played with a homemade gyroscope and wrote formulas on the back of Lin Xi's Mathematical Olympiad certificate that was torn up by her younger brother. They used a modified motorcycle speedometer to calculate the healing rate of each other's wounds, and carved reverse parabolas on the overpass pillars - that was the date Jiang Yan signed up for underground racing, and the bonus was enough to pay for her grandma's dialysis fee for the next season. Lin Xi melted the jade bracelet left by his mother into bearing balls and embedded them into the drive shaft of his Suzuki Hayabusa: "With this, the last corner can be made 0.3 Seconds faster." Five years later, in late autumn, Lin Xi stopped in front of the window of a motorcycle modification shop. The glass reflected her suit skirt, and the championship racing car in the showcase had a faded woolen bear tied to its front fork. Jiang Yan's text message suddenly vibrated on the phone: "At ten o'clock tonight, we will test the new engine at the same place." She didn't know that this was the 127th timed message he had sent in three years—since the "accident" on his 22nd birthday, the cloud program was still stubbornly continuing his heartbeat rate. The heavy rain washed away the guardrail of the winding mountain road, and Lin Xi rushed into the arena holding the peace charm left by Jiang Yan. The jade bearing he forged back then was burning hot at her collarbone, and the dusty driving record suddenly lit up on the big screen - 22-year-old Jiang Yan suddenly turned around at the last corner. The helmet camera was fixed on Lin Xi's selfie on her 22nd birthday, and the dashboard time always stopped at 00:00. Firefighters found an unsent wedding ring box from the wreckage, with the latest improved centrifugal force formula engraved on the lining. The jade bearing showed red lines in the high temperature, which were exactly the same as the birthmark of Lin Xi's stepmother's newborn son. Jiang Yan's cloud program was suddenly updated in the early morning, and a strange audio message came: "Protect her for me." It was his voice, but it was trembling like never before. Concept: In a youth intertwined with engine oil and scratch paper, two souls thrown off the track by fate use the roar of the locomotive to translate the unspeakable pain, and use physical formulas to deconstruct the function of the heartbeat. When his wrench calibrated her drive shaft, and when her red pen circled the deviation value of his life, those sharp cracks from a broken family actually grew in resonance with a tenderness that was tougher than steel.