Chapter 1 Prologue A warm night breeze blew in my face, as if it came from...
It was 7:48 p.m. when Lin Xia swiped her card and left the company.
Night has fallen, but for most people, the overtime workday has just begun. Stepping out the door and looking up, the towering skyscrapers surrounding the CBD are still ablaze with lights. Behind each small rectangular window is a desk, a person working overtime, pages of PowerPoint presentations, and monitors.
Busy, anxious, glamorous, and exhausted.
This is the urban workplace life that many people of Lin Xia's generation have seen and longed for in Hong Kong and American TV dramas since childhood. When they are actually in it, they find that it is not so beautiful, but it is not too bad either.
This is generally true of all the differences between ideals and reality in the world.
Lin Xia's company, MT, isn't a leading internet company, but it's one of the biggest in the industry. As a content designer, she primarily handles graphic illustrations. She doesn't often work overtime, but she's often busy before major holidays, trying to launch new themed products before the deadline. Halloween is just two weeks away, and her project team focuses on overseas markets. Halloween is a major event in the second half of the year, and they'll be heading into the busy fourth quarter.
On the streets of Shenzhen in mid-October, the temperature remained hot even after nightfall. After staying in a cold air-conditioned room for a whole day, Lin Xia felt that every pore of her body was emitting visible cold air as she walked to the subway station.
Over the years, as she journeyed from north to south, her journeys grew longer and her winters shorter, yet her sense of the seasons grew increasingly blurred. She could no longer perceive the growth of things, nor the withering of plants, as the years passed by in a hurry.
She entered the subway, passed security, scanned the code to enter the gate, and got off the elevator. Before she could stand firmly in front of the yellow safety line, the subway had already arrived at the station, the screen door opened, and she poured into the car with the crowd.
Lin Xia studied in Beijing during college and was always careful to avoid peak travel times. She only witnessed the horribly crowded morning and evening rush hours a few times. It was only after she came to Shenzhen that she truly experienced the traffic dispatching capabilities of a first-tier city operating at their peak.
During peak hours, the average interval between Shenzhen Metro trains is 1 minute and 20 seconds. Usually, the next subway train arrives at the station before the previous one leaves.
When Lin Xia saw it for the first time, she was wondering why there was a traffic jam in the subway.
This city doesn't allow waiting.
After boarding the train, Lin Xia found a corner to stand. There were still empty seats, but more young people chose to stand. After sitting in the office all day, my fitness tracker vibrated countless times. I could only use the commute to relax my lumbar spine, but I couldn't really care less about my cervical spine, which was constantly hunched over my phone.
The train started moving, and the advertising screen outside the window in front of her flashed by rapidly. Using the principle of the phenakistoscope, it lingered on the human retina for a long time. After a few seconds, it finally returned to darkness. She saw her own reflection in the window and took off the hair tie that bound her head, letting her long black curls fall to her shoulders.
I just washed my hair this morning, and after sitting in front of the monitor for ten hours, my hair is oily again.
She was tugging at the ends of her bangs with her fingers, considering whether to change her shampoo brand or her job, when a series of message alerts rang out from the phone in her bag.
It was a message from the work group. She clicked on it and typed a reply without any expression.
After the situation was resolved, the subway whizzed through two more stops, and she still had two stops to go before getting off.
After exiting the chat interface, she clicked on the Moments.
Fitness, travel, food, gifts—everyone makes their lives look presentable and glamorous. The truth is, only they know. But within this tiny space, comments and likes, are one of the few connections between people in modern society.
She saw that her studio classmate got married, her college senior got promoted, her graduate school roommate was sunbathing in Thailand, and then she saw Tan Zhizhou.
This guy was her high school classmate, three years her senior. They had never met in high school, but their university campuses were adjacent, and they had crossed paths because of one person, but they weren't very familiar with each other. She only knew that he joined a government department after graduation, then resigned to work in an investment bank, where he was successful and doing well, and was now also in Shenzhen.
He posted a photo of a dining table with no one showing, captioned:
Old friends reunited after long time no see.
Lin Xia had already swiped past it subconsciously, but for some reason she swiped back and clicked on the photo.
The photo was mediocre, lacking any composition or lighting. It was simply a picture of a cluttered table, seemingly taken on a whim mid-meal. A hand, near the wine glass on the table, caught the eye: a man's right hand, slender and clean, with distinct knuckles, a beautiful sight.
The photo was sharp, and when zoomed in, one could clearly see the slight deformation of the joints between his index and middle fingers, a testament to his youthful diligence in learning to hold a pen at his desk. A sliver of his wrist was visible from his sleeve. He wore no watch, but a thin silver ring on his middle finger seemed quite old, not as shiny as new, but rather possessing a gentle, timeless quality.
However, Lin Xia knew that this seemingly antique ring had a childish Mickey Mouse head engraved on the inside of the ring.
It was a product of Hong Kong Disneyland eight years ago, originally a pair of couple rings.
The fingertip hovered on the screen for a long time, and the action remained unchanged until the phone automatically locked the screen after 60 seconds.
A familiar broadcast announcement sounded, and as the station announcements alternated in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, Lin Xia put her phone back into her bag and followed the crowd out of the car.
I boarded the elevator, swiped my card through the gate, and exited through Exit D. Everything was the same as it had been repeated a thousand times before. From the ground up, the concrete city remained unchanged, the streets still brightly lit and bustling with life at midnight.
However, for a moment, Lin Xia seemed to have some illusions. The warm night breeze blew in her face, as if it came from the summer when she was sixteen.
All the details seem clear as of yesterday, yet vague as of the previous life.
That summer that will never come again in this lifetime.
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