old letter
The rain slanted down, blurring the windowpane into a hazy, watery mess. Chen Mo squatted in the corner of the storage room, his fingertips brushing away the dust accumulated on the cardboard boxes, which made him cough and turn his head away. The moving company would arrive tomorrow, and this old house he had lived in for ten years would finally be saying goodbye to him forever.
At the bottom of the cardboard box was a faded leather notebook, its plastic cover still printed with a childish bear pattern. He paused, then remembered that it was Ah Yu's diary. That year, she was fifteen, with her hair in a ponytail, and she shoved the notebook into his arms, saying that when she went to Guangzhou to study at a vocational school, she would ask him to keep her secrets.
“Chen Mo, look, this page shows you climbing a tree to steal a bird’s nest and falling down.” She laughed so hard she almost fell over, the end of her braid brushing against the back of his hand like a nimble hummingbird.
The diary lay open on her lap, its pages yellowed and brittle. The first page was written in large, crooked characters with a highlighter: "Ah Yu and Ah Mo will be best friends for life!" Next to it were two stick figures, one with a topknot and the other missing a front tooth.
Chen Mo's fingertips traced the toothless stick figure, his Adam's apple bobbing. Summers when he was fifteen always seemed endless, the cicadas' chirping making the afternoons long and sultry. He and Ah Yu would often share a mung bean popsicle under the old locust tree; she would always push his sweeter half to him, while she gnawed on the icy stick, saying that girls needed to lose weight.
“You’re lying,” he muttered with an ice pop in his mouth, “You stole some of the sugar cakes my mom made yesterday.”
Ah Yu reached out and covered his mouth, her palm feeling the coolness of the mung bean paste. Sunlight filtered through the gaps in the locust tree leaves, falling on her face, her eyelashes casting dappled shadows like a row of tiny butterflies.
Tucked inside the diary was a faded movie ticket stub from a re-release of "Titanic." They had just started high school that year. Ah Yu had saved up half a month's allowance to buy two tickets, but she cried uncontrollably in the theater. When the movie ended, her eyes were red and swollen like a rabbit's, and she insisted that he promise her that if she ever fell into the water, he would jump in to save her even if he couldn't swim.
"How silly of me," he flicked her forehead, "I already signed up for swimming lessons."
Actually, he didn't sign up for any classes. He just secretly went to the swimming pool every weekend, swallowing water countless times, until he could swim a dozen laps. He never told Ah Yu about this.
The rain grew heavier, pattering against the windowsill. Chen Mo flipped to a few pages in his diary, where a crumpled sticky note was tucked inside. On it were chemical formulas written in pencil, next to a little figure sticking out its tongue. He suddenly remembered the chemistry test in his second year of high school. Ah Yu had always said she was sure she'd fail, and during evening self-study, she'd drag him to the back of the classroom for intensive tutoring. Her notebook was always filled with all sorts of little drawings; hydrogen atoms were drawn as little figures wearing round hats, and carbon dioxide molecules looked like two balloons holding hands.
"How can you remember the knowledge points like this?" He laughed at her, pointing at the doodles, but after she turned away, he secretly filled his notebook with the same little figures. Later, Ah Yu passed the test. She bounced around on the playground, holding her report card, her ponytail swinging joyfully, insisting on treating him to fried skewers from the school gate. The wind that day carried the aroma of cumin powder. She stuffed the last skewer of fish tofu into his mouth and said, "Chen Mo, if I become a chemist in the future, I'll invent a sugar cake for you that won't make you fat."
He was chewing on scalding hot fish tofu, his breath coming in gasps from the heat, but he still nodded and said okay. Looking back now, those promises were like soap bubbles, shimmering with iridescent colors in the sunlight, bursting at the slightest touch.
Tucked inside the diary was a faded photograph taken on the day of her high school graduation. In the photo, Ah Yu was wearing a blue and white school uniform, standing under a camphor tree in front of the teaching building, holding her acceptance letter, smiling and revealing her two little tiger teeth. She ultimately didn't go to a vocational school in Guangzhou, but instead got into a local teachers' college, while he went to a university in the north.
The day she saw him off at the train station, Ah Yu carried a faded canvas bag filled with tea eggs she had boiled overnight. As the train pulled away, she ran a long way along the platform, her ponytail fluttering in the wind like a tiny flag. He waved to her through the train window, watching her figure grow smaller and smaller until she became a blurry yellow dot. That was the first time they had been separated by such a great distance, and the first time he tasted the bitterness of longing, like an unripe plum, so sour it made him wince.
For four years of university, they kept in touch through letters and phone calls. Ah Yu's letters were always long, with various little drawings along the edges—sometimes the sycamore trees outside her dormitory window, sometimes a cat dozing off in class. She would tell her stories about the department, how the new sweet and sour pork ribs in the cafeteria weren't good, how she missed home, and how she missed the mung bean popsicles under the old locust tree. He, on the other hand, would always write back about how beautiful the snow was in the north and how warm the heating was in the library, but he never told her that every weekend he would go to the supermarket near the school, buy a bag of mung bean popsicles, and sit alone on the bleachers of the sports field, eating them slowly, imagining that she was right beside him.
Chen Mo turned to the second half of the diary, where the handwriting gradually became more mature, and a few tear stains occasionally appeared on the pages. It was from when she first started working as a teacher at an elementary school, grading mountains of homework every day and dealing with mischievous students. In her diary, she wrote: "I was criticized by the principal today, and I feel so wronged. I really want to go back to high school, when as long as you got good grades, you didn't have to be afraid of anything."
He remembered that during that time, Ah Yu would often call him late at night, her voice filled with deep exhaustion. He didn't know how to comfort her, and could only repeatedly say, "It's okay, tomorrow will be better." Looking back now, he realized how clumsy he had been, his heart overflowing with heartache, yet he didn't know how to express it. Later, he asked someone to send him a box of local specialties from the north, including the frozen pears she had mentioned and a beautifully packaged notebook. On the notebook's title page, he wrote: "Ah Yu, you are not fighting alone."
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