On a winter night when they were seventeen, Shen Zhiheng circled the tiny mint plant Qian Ziluo had drawn on her physics competition draft paper and wrote, "Not up to standard, but recognizable." Back then, they didn't know some equations would be solved incorrectly, and some people would drift apart, like the first snow falling on a workbook and melting before you knew it.
Five years later, beside the champagne roses at Zhiyu Flower Shop, Shen Zhiheng bent over to wrap a bouquet, just as he had when helping her pick thorns off a rose all those years ago. Qian Ziluo stood at the counter, holding the twenty stems of eucalyptus her professor had asked for, as if she were holding an unspoken longing that had crossed the years.
One was a computer science graduate who looked after a flower shop and wrote code. The other was a researcher returning to China with a head full of physics equations. When they met again, their polite small talk was more awkward than the competition questions had been, until the symbols in the Schrödinger equation were written incorrectly once more on a bookmark design for the research institute.
"It should be Ψ." Shen Zhiheng looked up. In his eyes was the warmth hidden beneath reason, unchanged after five years.
Qian Ziluo suddenly understood. Some mistakes are repeated, and so are some heartbeats. Just like the line "The elm seeds fall of their own accord" in Qin Guan's poem, after circling around and around, they would eventually land where they belonged.
And the mint bookmark that had once prompted a security officer to ask, "What is this for?" had been slipped back into Shen Zhiheng's old competition notebook on the very first day they met again.
The prologue took too long to write. This time, it was finally time for the main story.
Theme: Time may pass, but affection and connection will always find their way home.
