He is Lu Zeheng, the heir to a top wealthy family. His suit cuffs are always ironed, but his fingertips are always unconsciously caressing the bamboo-patterned jade pendant. Everyone thinks that his world is only about financial reports and marriage. No one knows that he will stop for the "Autumn Bamboo Picture" in the corner. When he asked his assistant to add a spotlight to the painting, there was an unspoken "resemblance to a certain person" hidden in his throat.
He is Zhao Yuqing, the painter in the studio in the old city. The ginkgo leaves on the bluestone always fall on his painting paper. The bamboo shadow left by his father is his unspoken root. Relatives said that "there is no future in art", but he sat in front of the painting desk until dawn, until one rainy night, the cuffs of his cedar-scented suit brushed against his shoulder protecting the painting, and the blanket he was handed was restrained with the restraint of "don't catch a cold".
Their intersection is like a bamboo shadow stacked on a window: he used the excuse of "decorating the office" to take away his bamboos, plums, and orchids, but he couldn't help reading it in the painting; he secretly put "Returning on a Rainy Night" into his office, and the car lights in the painting were always on, as if waiting for some unspoken "Me too."
In the smell of alcohol on New Year's Eve, he grabbed the hand that wiped the corner of his mouth, and after the other person pulled away, he heard himself say, "I seem to like you a little bit." When the wind blew the words away, he didn't see the red eyes when he turned around.
The pull later was the thorn of reality: the blind date photos in the financial pages, "Dr. Zhou" at the hospital door, the torn pieces of "Bamboo and Stone Pictures", and when he handed over the check, he pushed it back and said calmly, "We are just friends."
He went to the south, and there were bananas and rain in the painting; he stayed in the old city, and there was an unfinished cat on the stone table under the bamboo.
Three years later, the art exhibition reunited. He stood in front of the completed "Bamboo and Stone Pictures" and received a copy of "Returning on a Rainy Night". On the back were the words he had been waiting for three years: "I heard it on the terrace that day."
Saying goodbye at the station, he took the osmanthus cake thermal bucket. The note on the bottom read, "The green bamboo is not broken, and the wind makes a sound." When the shadow of the tree outside the car window receded, he touched the inscription of the word "ze" on the bottom of the inkstone and suddenly understood: There are some things you like that you don't have to own, like the marks on the bamboo that will fade but never fade, like the sound of the wind blowing through the bamboo tops, you can clearly hear it at a certain moment even though you are thousands of miles away -
"I still remember you."
(All the unsaid confessions are hidden in the inkstone inscriptions, the bamboo bracelets and the notes on the bottom of the sweet-scented osmanthus cake. This is not a perfect story, but it is the truest concern of adults: we cannot walk together, but we have become the scars in each other's lives that will never fade.)
Intention: Want to get closer but have to push away