[A well-behaved boy raised in a small county town] x [a wild boy from the big city]
A campus romance about healing through memories. It's first love, from ages 17 to 18. The story begins at 23, as he looks back on the past.
It's sweet, guaranteed sweet. It just seems a little bittersweet at first (seriously).
At twenty-three, Wen Tong quit his stifling job in the big city and returned to the little county town where he grew up.
His mother's eye condition had worsened, and she was bedridden, so he had no choice but to go back and care for her.
"Tongtong, Mom only has you..."
He got into an argument with his mother, then ran away.
He fled back home.
There, he dug out the keepsake his father had left him: an old mobile phone.
As if possessed, he found the charging cable. After a long while, the screen finally lit up, and a text from six years ago appeared before his eyes:
- Would you come away with me?
-
On a rainy afternoon six years ago, Wen Tong met the person who had barged into his life when he was seventeen.
"Hi, my name is Chen Suisheng."
He was carefree and passionate, as full of life as an ear of wheat, and completely out of place in this little border town.
Yet on another sweltering afternoon, with the classroom fan creaking overhead, he leaned close to Wen Tong's ear and asked:
"Wen Tong."
"Do you like me?"
-
His father had once asked him, "Tongtong, if Dad dies, will you be scared?"
Wen Tong thought, I don't know, but Dad would never leave me behind.
But later, his father was gone all the same.
That night, torrential rain poured down. His mother cried herself hoarse at the hospital, while Wen Tong ran away.
He fled the hospital and ran home, then ran out again, with nowhere left to escape.
Until someone pulled him into an embrace, damp and warm, holding him close. The whole world disappeared, leaving only the sound of their hearts beating together.
"I'll take you away. I'll get you out of here."
"Come with me, okay?"
-
At twenty-three, Wen Tong returned to his hometown and stepped onto the grounds of the school that had long since become a ruin.
He climbed the moss-covered steps, pushed open the rusty iron gate, and passed the writing left on the blackboard in chalk.
"Chen Suisheng."
If only he'd been able to say yes back then.
If only he could return to the past.
Return to the moments when he made the wrong choices, to that rainy night, to the moment when he hadn't dared to take the hand reaching out to him...
"Would you still come away with me?"
"...I would."
When he came to his senses, he finally found the courage to take the hand reaching out to him.
Even though they had both grown up into people they no longer recognized.
Cover credit: Qinyuanchun
The outline is still being worked on. Feel free to help bring this story into the world!
Theme: If only there were no 'if onlys'
