In the summer of 2008, the mint candy he gave me melted in the 37°C hot evening breeze, and together with my frantic heartbeat, stuck to the title page of youth.
The numbers that were torn off the countdown card for the college entrance examination that year were like scabbed wounds, and every page oozed confusion called the future. The chalk dust in the cram school, the burning feeling on his wrist when holding an old umbrella during the heavy rain, the starlight falling with the model airplane in his eyes in the abandoned repair shop... All the subtle throbbing and dull pain were amplified by the chirping of cicadas and evaporated by the heat.
The black cross on the volunteer list cut through the dream, the faded candy wrapper in the tin box wrapped the southbound train, and in the steaming heat wave on the platform, the promise that was torn apart by the whistle finally turned into the glimmer of a three-word text message in the lights of the Yangtze River - look at the surface of the river. At that moment, the stars on the other side lit up layer by layer, and behind them, the summer about Nanjing, China Southern Airlines, and each other fell apart at the end of the railway track.
This is a story about secret love that sprouts and withers between ideal and reality. It is a canoe-like dense and painful strokes, which outlines the cracks where class differences have crushed the dreams of young people. It is the echo of two hearts being silently broken under the weight of fate. The crushed admission notices, the umbrella ribs wrapped with tape, the expired candies buried deep in the bridgehead... Are all secret marks carved by youth that will never heal.
"The cicadas stop chirping in August" - In the seventh autumn when the sycamore leaves fall, I look back at the heavy rain that soaked my whole life, and the other shore that has never been reached. The water of the Yangtze River is as dark as a ribbon, tying up two collapsed summers and a flight path that failed to take off.
Concept: The thorns of class penetrate the flight path that failed to take off, and the stars of the unreached bridgehead are engraved on the bones of youth.
