11. The Rashomon of Love
Life is full of irony.
Before Fang Kaixuan's unexpected confession at the Vietnamese pho shop in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, Chen Zhilun had just experienced the darkest moment of his life.
His college classmate, Su Jingya, whom he had a crush on, suddenly announced her marriage. Upon hearing this news, Chen Zhilun wandered alone along the Congo River for a very long time.
"At that time, I really thought about jumping down." Chen Zhilun later told his good friend.
Fang Kaixuan later heard about this through various channels. When she was angry, she and Xiaoju cursed Chen Zhilun together: "Why didn't he jump down and end it all? If he had, none of what happened afterward would have happened, and he wouldn't have had the chance to harm me."
Despite his words, Fang Kaixuan hated Chen Zhilun, but not to the point of wishing him dead.
What's frustrating is that the world is such a chaotic and irrational place. The butterfly effect operates erratically and without reason, leaving us helpless.
If Su Jingya hadn't suddenly gotten married, Chen Zhilun wouldn't have confessed his feelings to Fang Kaixuan during their layover. And without that dramatic confession, Fang Kaixuan wouldn't have been so instantly smitten, and all the mess that followed wouldn't have happened.
In that case, she and Chen Zhilun might still be good friends.
Now that things have come to this, would Fang Kaixuan rather be the one who cheated? At least he wouldn't suffer such a painful memory, his heart shattered beyond repair.
Having let their imaginations run wild to this point, Xiao Ju and Fang Kaixuan looked at each other and laughed until tears streamed down their faces.
Xiao Ju's tears were purely out of sarcasm. This Chen Zhilun, how promiscuous he is.
Fang Kaixuan's tears, however, were much more complex and melancholic. Self-deprecation, sadness, sarcasm, amusement... a multitude of mixed emotions ultimately coalesced into two light, fleeting tears.
*
Back to Chen Zhilun. He and Su Jingya had a somewhat ambiguous relationship during their university years. At that time, Su Jingya was the recognized beauty of her class. Even in the foreign language college, where beauties were plentiful, she stood out from the crowd. Countless boys showed interest in her, and there were also quite a few suitors from nearby science and technology universities.
At that time, Chen Zhilun wasn't particularly outstanding; he could only quietly be Su Jingya's confidant. No matter what happened, he would always be her understanding friend.
They were just ordinary friends; he never expected anything more.
Until shortly after graduation, when he left Beijing for Brazzaville, a place with an awkward name, Chen Zhilun always regarded Su Jingya as a kind of melancholy nostalgia.
He usually chats and contacts Fang Kaixuan the most.
The days spent on overseas assignments are so tedious, mundane, and arduous that it's hard for anyone who hasn't experienced it to imagine.
Brazzaville is separated from Kinshasa, the capital of another country, by a river. These were names Fang Kaixuan only occasionally heard in international news. In those years, she often unconsciously searched for news about the city, but even in the margins of international news, it was never a focus.
It was just too far. Fang Kaixuan only learned bits and pieces from the emails Chen Zhilun sent him. For example, the city had been the capital of French Central Congo and French Equatorial Africa during the colonial period, so French was spoken. But Chen Zhilun joked, not without a hint of bitterness, that Fang Kaixuan's listening skills, honed in Paris, would certainly not be able to understand the African accent he had adopted here.
Chen Zhilun certainly couldn't be said to be indifferent to Fang Kaixuan; ten years is no small amount of time in anyone's life. But those feelings weren't intense enough to push him to confess. It was Su Jingya's marriage announcement that plunged him into despair, and he instinctively reached out, trying to grasp at something.
Hold on to what remains in life: what is solid, reliable, and unchanging.
At that moment, the only thing he could grasp, the only thing that could be described as unchanging, was Fang Kaixuan's feelings for him.
Although he never said it outright, Chen Zhilun couldn't possibly have been unaware of Fang Kaixuan's feelings after spending so much time together.
There were a few moments when they almost confessed their feelings to each other.
But these two overly shy and slow-to-warm-up individuals repeatedly missed opportunities. Until life, with its unstoppable and strange trajectory, pushed Chen Zhilun to this moment.
At this moment, even he himself seemed to have left his body, observing a Chen Zhilun who was burdened with worries, and hesitantly asked:
"I hope you... can be my girlfriend with marriage in mind."
He saw Fang Kaixuan's astonishment and disbelief at that moment.
Heaven and earth were dark and yellow, the universe was vast and boundless, and at least for that moment he was convinced that he was sincere.
But in the dead of night, the name Su Jingya remained a forbidden zone in his heart.
He didn't intentionally compare Fang Kaixuan to anyone else; that would be underestimating their long-standing relationship. At this moment, what he needed was unchanging gentleness and understanding—different from the highs and lows, the constant longing, the heart-wrenching pain…
But who can say that love can only have one form of expression? Chen Zhilun comforted himself with this thought.
He knew that he and Fang Kaixuan would definitely be an enviable couple.
Looking back at this story, Fang Kaixuan and Chen Zhilun's narratives are quite different.
But that's how they started dating. Since they agreed that marriage was the goal, they were both very serious about it.
Everything seemed to be going very smoothly. Although Fang Kaixuan still suffered a lot in the last six months of his studies, with every exam fraught with danger, he was fortunate enough to graduate in the end.
In the last six months, most of the Chinese students at the same school were trying their best to find jobs to stay, even going so far as to intern at small companies run by their compatriots that were on the fringes of labor laws. They were just grateful to get SMIC minimum wage.
Fang Kaixuan was the only one who remained carefree and single-minded, because since her reunion with Chen Zhilun, she had not considered staying for even a minute.
Fang Kaixuan's best friend in class was a stunningly beautiful classmate from Slovakia. From the first day she arrived in Paris, she vowed to stay. The beauty was 178cm tall, incredibly intelligent, and could switch seamlessly between English and French, speaking fluently and naturally. Her slight Eastern European accent only added to her charm. However, she had absolutely no interest in studying and started working part-time as a model and actress from her first year of university.
She possessed a natural, unadorned beauty, so beautiful that she was approached by men almost every day on the street, and even had older, wealthy men from unknown countries offer her the position of mistress. But she refused them all, determined to establish herself in Paris on her own.
Of the thirty-odd students in the class, only the two of them came from socialist or former socialist countries. Although they were thousands of miles apart, they found many similarities in their past lives and naturally became friends, often making fun of the hypocrisy and meanness of the French whites.
She was very surprised by Fang Kaixuan's decision to return to China immediately after graduation: "Why won't you even give it a try?"
"I'm going back to marry the person I love," Fang Kaixuan said happily.
Years later, Fang Kaixuan despised women who were obsessed with love as the most foolish, completely forgetting that he himself had once been one of them.
Looking back today, it seems ridiculously stupid.
At that time, Fang Kaixuan felt like the luckiest person in the world. Sometimes, when she was doing her homework until midnight, her roommates were already fast asleep. Alone in front of a small desk lamp, she would drift off into her own thoughts in the dim light, her mind wandering back to Beijing, thousands of miles away.
At the time, she lived in the 93rd arrondissement outside Paris, a place completely different from the Parisian landscape that tourists imagine. There were no iconic Haussmann buildings in the city center, no secondhand bookstores and cafes along the Seine, only rows of hastily built gray-white houses and the RER railway line connecting to the suburbs. It was twilight, and crows would occasionally fly by cawing.
In the middle of the night, Fang Kaixuan is prone to overthinking, and at times, a sense of fear arises in his heart: What have I, an ordinary person, done to deserve such a love so easily? Is it possible that this easy success is a preemption of my future happiness?
There was no response from outside the window, only a pale gray moon gazing at her.
///
Congratulations on having such a beautiful cover!
What a beautiful cover!
Oh dear, I haven't seen it myself yet. Thank you, Teacher Jiu!
Haha, finally one that looks good! Thanks~
Congratulations on signing your new work!
Thank you~ Welcome to visit!
It made me wonder what Fang Kaixuan would have become if he had stayed in France.
Haha, you could also write an IF statement, "A long, long time ago..."
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