The heartbeats of my boyhood are the inadvertent looks at each other when we are divided into groups in the classroom, the stationery brought by the students who live in the dormitory and the students who run away from school, and the simple drawings secretly drawn in the corners of the exercise books.
They are like two stars gradually approaching, exchanging tiny pieces of warmth in the orbit of youth.
In the year when the sycamore leaves wrote secret words in the wind, Shen Cichuan rolled up the cuffs of his school uniform to his elbows and handed over the exercise booklet while leaning on the mottled railing.
"If the monsoon tomorrow can still blow us to the same school gate," the young man's eyes held the crushed sunset, "let the heartbeat hidden in the experimental report rise to the new dawn and dusk line forever."
The setting sun slanted across the glass of the water-drawing room. Jiang Nianxu's fingers holding the water glass suddenly tightened, and scalding heat filled the air.
From then on, every noon, the sounds of footsteps on the water fetching road and the dancing stars in the dialog box became footnotes of running towards the promise.
But time is the best at telling lies.
When the cicadas chirp in midsummer again, the promises once made have quietly faded away over the years.
Purpose: Use the regrets of youth to interrogate the truth of growth: Those heartbeats that end without a problem are not the failure of love, but the fact that we, when we were young, learned to accept the impermanence of fate through clumsy temptations, and in the collision of enthusiasm and loss, we completed our first recognition of love and loss.