Under the pressure of the countdown to the college entrance examination, Jiang Rong silently counted the wonderful "mistakes" between him and Gu Weizhou at the front desk: 37 misplaced moments in passing test papers. Every "mistake" - an entrapped ginkgo leaf, an unfinished sketch of a benzene ring, a rolled mint candy - is like a password carefully buried by a young man, shimmering in the gaps between the mountains of books and the sea of topics. The morning light passed through the broken hair on the back of Gu Weizhou's neck, casting fluffy spots of light when his back was precisely aligned with the edge of her textbook, and it also quietly spread away the helpless ink spots on the girl's chemistry notes.
However, on the eve of that fateful exam, a sudden high fever and a silent absence made the carefully planned 38th "passing error" become an eternal sound. Jiang Rong's outstretched hand only touched the cold void. Ten years passed, and when Jiang Rong unexpectedly encountered the faded mint candy again at the class reunion, the words "The 38th error in passing the paper was not an accident" reflected on the candy paper were like a belated thunder. An old thermometer with mercury permanently frozen at 37.2°C was gently placed in her palm - "That day you had a fever and asked for leave. I copied the temperature of your palm in the laboratory."
The dusty truth peeled off: the torn admission ticket, the desperate silhouette in the hospital corridor, the night at the planetarium when he failed to attend the appointment, and those unspoken secret words of paper cranes and invitations from the wrong question book... 37 Tacit approaches were the clumsy and hot heartbeat of the young man; a "mistake" torn apart by fate was the grandest silent farewell of youth. Ten years later, when the yellowed planetarium ticket stubs and the solidified temperature scale reunited, they finally understood that those misplaced pages, rolling sugar grains, and fluffy spots contained the most secret and long-lasting affection of an era - it did not disappear, but just like the 37.2°C mercury column, it was accurately sealed by time, becoming a footnote of youth that lasts through the years and never cools down.
Intention: The eternity of things that have not yet arrived - the paper cranes that have not been sent, the invitations that have not been opened, and the unfinished scrolls have gained the power of transcendence and perfection due to their eternal absence.