Chapter Thirty-Eight
Tan Yuze's brightest memory is from when he was five years old.
There was an orange floor lamp in the living room, and my parents were dancing a slow waltz under the lamp.
Dad picked up Mom and spun her around, and Mom laughed like a string of bells.
He thought that the light in "home" would always be on.
The light was turned off when Tan Yuze was seven years old.
Mom started coming home late, smelling of tobacco and unfamiliar cologne. The sound of her smashing a bottle was like thunder. The first time she hit him, she slammed an empty bottle on his shoulder—"Why are you crying? Shut up!"
A shard of glass cut his finger, and blood dripped onto the floor like sparks before a light bulb goes out.
When I was eight, my mother left with her suitcase.
She said, "You should live with your dad; he's the good guy." But the "good guy" never hugged him again after that.
My dad started drinking, and he drank until the early hours of the morning, then he vomited into the toilet.
Tan Yuze heated up milk in the kitchen, poured it into a cup, and then poured it out—he didn't know who to give it to.
When he was ten, his father remarried. His stepmother's voice was like a thin blade. When his father was away, the blade would fall on him and his sister.
"burden"
"Just as cheap as your mother." The harsh words reached my ears.
...
She pinched the inside of his thigh without leaving a mark. He learned to convert the pain into a math problem: 3 seconds per pinch, 7 days on average for a scab to form, 52 weeks in a year, about 156 seconds.
But the pain is endless.
At twelve, he ran away from home for the first time, taking only his math competition certificate and a jacket. He sat outside a 24-hour convenience store until 3 a.m.
The shop assistant gave him a cup of hot water. The steam from the cup obscured Tan Yuze's face, making him even less inclined to go home. But then he thought of his young sister, Tan Yuqi.
At that moment, he realized that even the kindness of strangers could make people cry.
At fifteen, he grew to 1.78 meters tall. His stepmother dared not lay a hand on him anymore, and she began to sculpt his bones with words.
“Your dad stopped loving you a long time ago. He hates your mom, and he hates you too.”
He always puts the earphones in his ears and turns the volume up to the maximum.
I wasn't listening to a song, I was listening to my heartbeat.
He thought: If heartbeat could also get full marks, that would be the only test paper I wouldn't lose points on.
At sixteen, he was admitted to the city's No. 1 High School.
On the day he left home, he took two things with him:
1. The shards of glass from that orange floor lamp.
2. The last unopened bottle of red wine in Dad's wine cabinet.
He poured it into the trash can on the high-speed train and heard a "whoosh" sound, like he was throwing away his childhood.
At seventeen, he met her—Xu Li. The first time he saw her wasn't at the school gate, but at a competition training camp. She handed him a piece of scrap paper with a geometry problem she hadn't solved.
He stared at the question, and she stared at the old scar on his wrist.
After a long while, she whispered:
"There are many ways to solve this problem, but your solution does not need to add another 'painful' auxiliary line."
At that moment, the light seemed to flicker on again.
A few weeks before his eighteenth birthday ceremony, he buried the fragments of the lamp under a ginkgo tree and told his counselor:
“Tan Yuze was not sure if he was fully recovered, but he was certain that pain was no longer his coordinate axis; it was just a shadow he had once passed through.”
Tan Yuze folded the letter into a paper airplane, with the following words written on the nose:
"To my seven-year-old self—don't be afraid, your twenty-year-old self will be a lamp, and you will light the lamp yourself."
The plane took off, skimming over the fireworks of the school anniversary celebration, like the mist outside the convenience store that year, like the first ray of light when the orange floor lamp was lit again when I was five years old.
Tan Yuze was sent to the Moral Education Department. As a student council representative, he was there to handle affairs. The Dean of Students, Lao Song, asked him and several other student council members to fill out forms.
He was filling out the form with his head down when he suddenly heard someone call out behind him, "Tan Yuze, you dropped your ginkgo leaf."
Xu Li squatted down and picked up the thin, flattened ginkgo leaf. A faded red string was still tied to the stem—the very same one she had hung on her keychain at the treetop that day. The leaf was brittle from the sun, but its veins were as clear as a time map.
"I thought it had been blown away by the wind long ago." Tan Yuze took it and rubbed the veins of the leaf with his fingertips.
"I secretly put it away," Xu Li shrugged. "I was afraid you'd really forget about it."
After filling out the forms, the two walked side by side toward the teaching building, surrounded by crowds of students and teachers. The wheels of their suitcases rolled over the paving stones, making a continuous clicking sound, like the rhythm of a heartbeat.
Xu Li suddenly turned her head: "Did you go to the appointment at the psychological center?"
“I went.” Tan Yuze nodded. “The first time I cried, it was like the lamp my dad smashed when I was a child.”
He paused, his voice low but steady, "I didn't cry the second time, I just took out the light-emitting sheet and looked at its cracks in the sunlight—it turns out that cracks can also let in light."
The green light came on. The two continued walking. The wind rustled the leaves on both sides of the ginkgo avenue, making a sound like applause.
night.
The dormitory was a four-person room, and Tan Yuze's bed was by the window. He taped the ginkgo leaf to the wall in front of his desk, next to a new sticky note with four words written to him by Xu Li:
"Light comes from the crack."
It was one in the morning, and all his roommates were asleep. Tan Yuze turned on his desk lamp and took out the unopened bottle of red ink from his drawer—that day, his counselor had asked him to write down "what he wanted to say to the past."
Now, he finally unscrewed the bottle cap and gently traced an infinity symbol (∞) on the back of the ginkgo leaf. The ink spread along the veins of the leaf, like a wound slowly healing.
After finishing writing, he clasped the leaf in his palm, as if holding onto a piece of old time.
Outside the window, the lights in Tsinghua Garden went out one by one, leaving only the streetlights at the end of Ginkgo Avenue still lit. The light fell on the leaves, and the color shining through the cracks was the familiar orange he had seen in the living room when he was seven years old.
He spoke on stage as a representative of outstanding students. As for why he was the one to speak, Xu Li didn't go with him because she was already annoyed and there was no need for such trouble.
The last page of the speech contained only one sentence:
“I used to use pain as a coordinate, but now I write the coordinate as a formula—∞=1÷, and when the denominator approaches 0, the whole value approaches infinity.”
The audience erupted in applause.
He looked toward the first row of the audience, where Xu Li was holding up her phone, the screen displaying that familiar infinity-shaped light and shadow.
She mouthed to him, "The light is on."
Tan Yuze smiled.
This time, he didn't look down at the ginkgo leaf again. Because he knew—the light had already grown into an entire forest in his heart.
One by one, the lights in the senior high school building went out, leaving only the window of the counseling room still lit. Xu Li held the folder to her chest and gently knocked on the door three times.
The door opened a crack, and Lu Yi peeked out, his forehead covered in wisps of sweat.
"Xiao Lizi? Weren't you going to hand in your attendance sheet?"
"I've handed it in." Xu Li waved the brown paper bag in her hand. "I came to find you—and also to see the teacher."
Lu Yi paused for half a second, then stepped aside to let her in. Under the light, his shadow was shorter than usual, as if someone had secretly shaved a piece off it.
The two sat on a bench outside the consultation room for ten minutes in the corridor. Xu Li placed the paper bag on her lap and spoke in a very low voice.
“That day, Lao Cao asked me to collect everyone’s ‘letters to the future’. Your letter had a bus ticket stub tucked in it, with ‘August 12, 2015, Mom took me on the last bus’ written on the back. I want to know what happened that day.”
Lu Yi tapped his fingertips on his knee, as if counting beats.
“My mom left that day.” He grinned, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “She dropped me off at my grandma’s door, saying she was going to buy ice cream, and never came back.”
Xu Li didn't press him further, but simply took a ginkgo leaf from her pocket and handed it to him. "I dried it; it won't wither, just like your story."
Lu Yi gripped the leaf stem, his knuckles turning white, and finally spoke:
“My mother has depression and later remarried and moved to another city. My father… felt that I was a burden to her, and he would beat me when he was drunk. My grandmother was too old to protect me. During my three years of junior high school, I was covered in bruises.”
He paused, his voice low as a whisper, "That's why I like running—only in the wind can I not hear the slaps."
The counselor's door opened again. The counselor's surname was Zhou, she was in her early thirties, and her smile was like a glass of warm milk.
"Please come in, both of you."
The consultation room was carpeted in light gray, and there was a warm yellow floor lamp in the corner—just like the broken lamp Tan Yuze described.
Teacher Zhou gestured for Tan Yuze to sit on the single sofa, while Xu Li sat on the low stool behind him, like a quiet support.
Teacher Zhou handed him a box of colored pencils and a stack of white paper.
"Don't rush to talk, draw first."
Tan Yuze chose the darkest black, drew a straight track in the center of the paper, and then drew a small version of himself at the finish line.
Next, he drew rings of red fencing around the outside of the track.
“The track is freedom, the fence is the sound—my dad’s, my mom’s, the neighbors’.” When he said “neighbors”, his pen paused, and the red paint spread like a bleeding wound.
Xu Li noticed a pale white scar on the inside of his left wrist, like a crack that refused to heal.
Teacher Zhou's "Safety Island" training: "Now, close your eyes and imagine you are standing at the starting line of the track, but this time, there are many people standing outside the fence—who are they?"
Tan Yuze's Adam's apple bobbed: "My dad, holding a belt; my mom, with her back to me."
"Okay, slowly exhale, turning the fence into transparent glass. You can see them, but they can't get in."
Tan Yuze's breathing went from rapid to even.
“Now, put something at the end of the track that makes you want to run towards it.” He was silent for a long time before saying, “I want to put osmanthus cake that my grandma makes.”
"Then let it go."
In the scene, the father outside the glass begins to blur, but the aroma of osmanthus cake wafts over.
For the first time, Tan Yuze's lips curved into a genuine smile.
After Teacher Zhou finished his questioning training, he handed her a note: "As a friend, you can ask him a question."
Xu Li wrote: "If osmanthus cake could talk, what would it say to you?" Tan Yuze looked at the note, his eyes reddening, but he laughed out loud: "It would say—'Run slowly, don't fall, I'll wait for you.'"
Teacher Zhou put the track map into a transparent file bag and handed it to Tan Yuze. "Next time you come, we'll add gates to the fence."
Tan Yuze nodded, and as he turned around, Xu Li pinned the ginkgo leaf to his chest pocket.
"When the osmanthus flowers bloom, I run back to eat cakes."
"good."
The streetlights cast long shadows of the two of them. When they reached the ginkgo tree, Tan Yuze suddenly stopped.
"Little Li, thank you for not treating me like a pitiful wretch."
“You’re not a pitiful creature,” she kicked at the fallen leaves at her feet, “you’re a seed that hasn’t sprouted yet.”
The wind rustled through the ginkgo leaves, as if in response.
The lights in the counseling room went out, and Teacher Zhou wrote the last line in her notebook:
"The visitor, Tan Yuze, is revealing traumatic memories for the first time. He is emotionally stable and has a good support system (partner: Xu Li). Four follow-up interviews are planned, with the goal of establishing a 'safe haven' and gradually dismantling the barriers."
After finishing writing, she looked up at the window—the ginkgo tree stood silently in the night, yet something was clearly breaking through the soil.
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