On the last day of summer camp, He Zhixun stopped Lin Mu on the steps in the rear hall of the main building at Tsinghua University. “Let's be deskmates again next semester.”
When their second year of high school began, they really did end up in the same class again. They weren't desk mates, but he sat diagonally behind her. Whenever she turned around to borrow his notes, she would meet his quiet gaze.
At the New Year's Eve party that year, they were assigned to decorate the classroom together. As he steadied the wobbling chair while she hung streamers, she looked down at him. “He Zhixun, will you always be behind me?”
He looked up. “No.”
When she froze, he continued, “I'll come stand beside you.”
The summer after the college entrance exams, he called her. “Lin Mu, I got into Tsinghua.”
There was a three-second silence on the other end, then she replied with a laugh, “What a coincidence. I got into Peking University too.”
In September, four subway stops lay between Tsinghua's campus and Weiming Lake. Every Friday evening, he would appear by the window in the third reading room of Peking University's library, the spot where they had most often sat in high school.
“This time, we're really desk mates.” She looked at the Tsinghua textbook he had opened and drew a smiley face on the edge of her notebook.
Beside it, he wrote, “This time, it'll be for a lifetime.”
At a class reunion years later, someone asked how they had gotten together.
Lin Mu glanced at the person beside her and said with a smile, “It started when he said he wanted to be my desk mate...”
He Zhixun picked up where she left off. “And from then on, I never wanted us to part.”
The luckiest thing about youth
is having someone start out as your deskmate,
and gradually make their way into your future.
We met in that beautiful spring,
but we will never end in that spring.
Theme: Unknown.
