When the Stars Fall into Your Eyes

The day Xia Fanxing came, the ceiling fan in the classroom was spinning slowly. The head teacher pointed to the empty seat in the last row: "You can sit next to Zhang Qingquan. He has good grades and can help you keep up with the progress as soon as possible." She walked over with her schoolbag in her arms and saw clearly the boy lying on the table. The collar of the school uniform was buttoned to the top, covering half of his face. There were faint red marks on the exposed wrists, as if they had been strangled by something. The textbook stood on the corner of the table, with crooked words scratched on the cover with a utility knife. It was impossible to tell whether it was a name or something else. This was Xia Fanxing's first impression of Zhang Qingquan - like a sponge soaked by rain, heavy with wet and cold emotions, and afraid of squeezing out the bitterness when touched. He was as silent as a stone. When Xia Fanxing borrowed an eraser, he only pushed the thing towards the table, and his fingertips barely touched her hand; before she finished copying her notes, he would move his notebook two inches to the middle during class, but always kept his head down, and the broken hair on his forehead blocked all the light in his eyes. Until one night during self-study, Xia Fanxing caught a glimpse of him drawing a curled up cat on the back of the draft paper. It was painted black, leaving only two blank spots for the eyes. She quietly drew a star next to it and painted it brightly with a highlighter. The next morning, the scrap page was torn off and tucked into her Chinese language book. There is a very small line of words next to the star: "It will be covered by dark clouds." Xia Fanxing suddenly remembered that she passed by the downstairs of his house yesterday and heard the loud noise of breaking things and the curse of a man. It turns out that those silences are not his nature, but the wall built in his heart by his native family, which prevents even the sunlight from entering. She started stuffing hot milk in his drawer, and when he rushed into the classroom with red eyes after being scolded by his father, she pretended to ask him math questions; when he used a utility knife to mark the textbook, she handed him the tape with the star stickers on it. "Look," Xia Fanxing pointed out the window after a certain monthly exam, where the setting sun was dyeing the clouds golden red, "the stars are not always bright, but they will come out when the dark clouds disperse." Zhang Qingquan didn't say anything, but he stuffed a painting into her schoolbag after school that day. The painting shows two desks side by side. One of the desks is covered with star stickers, shining brightly in the shadows. Xia Fanxing suddenly understood that salvation was never about vigorous illumination, but like this. When a star hung stubbornly in his night sky, those corners that were frozen by his original family would always slowly warm up. Just like the painting in her hand at this moment, the tenderness hidden in the lines is quietly telling her: when the stars fall into the eyes, even the shadows will grow tentacles toward the light. Concept: In the coordinate system of youth, Xia Fanxing is a star with its own light, and Zhang Qingquan is a cocoon trapped in the shadow of his original family. When she transferred from another school and became a roommate with him who was silent due to family trauma, this encounter was a collision of light and cocoon - using the name of youth as an anchor, using companionship and understanding as a boat, a light path was opened beside the quagmire of the original family, allowing us to see: Even if the shadow is like ink, as long as someone is willing to become the stars in the eyes, they can pull each other away from the gravity of fate, and use the sincerity and tenderness of youth to boil the scars into sugar that illuminates the years to come.