Seventeen-year-old Wen Shuqing once did an unsolvable math problem.
The title is Xu Chen.
She remembered the blue ink mark left when the cuffs of his school uniform rubbed against her desk, her long fingers holding the rim of the cup while drinking milk tea, and the radical numbers and decimal points on his scratch paper that she could never count.
On the day the volunteer form was submitted, there was a heavy rain in Nanjing. She stood at the end of the corridor, watching his dark green back disappear around the corner of the stairs, clutching the note that she never sent out.
——Later she went to the city he said she wanted to go to, and he went further north. Those unlit matches, unexported photos, and misaligned aspirations eventually became the quietest embers of youth.
Purpose: commemorate youth