When Love Is Strong

In the early morning of early autumn, the sun shone slantly on the bluestone road, and the shadows of the sycamore trees were stretched thin. I stood at the end of a narrow alley in the old city and looked up at the three-story gray brick old building in front of me. The exterior wall is mottled, and the wall covering has peeled off in some places, revealing traces of an earlier layer of paint underneath. The window frames were made of wood, faded to white, with a few tiny cracks in the glass. The iron door at the entrance of the building was rusty, and there were scratches around the keyhole from repeated prying.