Chinese Love Story

On the first day of school, I labeled the thirty-two people in the class—extroverts, introverts, pushy people, and misfits. Classification makes me safe. As long as I put people into the corresponding boxes, I will not be affected by them. But I left out four people. Zhao Qingye put a candy on my table every day for three years. She didn't say why, and I pretended not to know. Chen Nian sat next to me, as quiet as porcelain, but the words she wrote on the draft paper became harder and harder, so hard that the paper was punctured. Shen Zhiyi was the first to smile at me, but I saw something else in her smile that I didn't dare to ask. Su Wan was sitting in the last row. When she lent me the book, she said, "Will you stop after reading this sentence?" She was asking me if I would stop - but I kept running. The track is very short, covering 800 meters in three minutes. But there are some things that I haven't reached the finish line even after running for three years. For example, how to say the first sentence, how not to back away when someone approaches, how to admit that a piece of candy can have a taste other than "sweet". It took me three years to learn one thing - people can be classified, but feelings cannot. You stuff them into the grid, and they flow out from the gaps and seep into all your supposedly rational calculations, causing every answer you calculate to have an error mark. This is a story about "miscalculation". I calculated all four questions wrong. But fortunately - before I miscalculated, someone had been waiting for a long time.