The late truth
On a late autumn night in Princeton, rain drummed against the windowpanes of his apartment. Chen Wang sat among a pile of unopened cardboard boxes, the diary open on his lap like a suddenly opened door to time. The light from the desk lamp fell on the elegant handwriting, the words, in varying shades of ink, silently overturning his ten-year understanding of the world.
September 23, 2009
He was wearing that dark blue sweater today. When the physics representative handed out homework, his fingertips brushed against mine as he handed me the notebook. All morning, I stared at those red fingertips, like guarding stolen starlight.
Chen Wang's breath suddenly stopped. He remembered the sweater; it was a gift his mother had brought back from her overseas study trip. But he had no recollection of the moment he handed in his homework, let alone the girl who had treasured it in her diary for thirteen years.
December 17, 2010
In the basketball finals, his right shoelace came undone as he scored the game-winning shot. Everyone saw his heroic run, but I saw the V-shaped sunburn mark on the back of his neck as he bent over to tie his shoelaces. When Zhou Xu handed him some water, he said thank you before looking up. I'll remember this detail forever.
He subconsciously touched the back of his neck. On the eve of the finals that year, he had indeed practiced on the open-air court until sunset. These details, even forgotten by himself, suddenly came alive in another person's youth.
Rainwater meandered across the glass like developing film. He continued to flip through the pages, each date an anchor in his memory:
The record of his hoarse voice when he had a cold on April 8, 2011; the description of the arc of his pen spinning when he was solving math problems on November 3, 2012; and even his absent-minded expression on the graduation day on June 15, 2013 because his sister had a fever, were all fully collected.
What shocked him most was the photo tucked into the pages of his senior year—the photo of "Moonlight Field" from the art festival. Written in pencil on the back of the diary:
They all said the photo was perfectly composed, but I knew only the blurred figure in the lower right corner was the true focal point. He turned around at the exact moment the shutter clicked. This 0.3-second coincidence is the greatest secret of my entire youth.
As the sound of rain intensified, he turned to his college days. It turned out that those "chance encounters": the adjacent seats in the library, the coincidence of choosing elective courses, and even the changes in the food in the cafeteria were all carefully calculated by her.
October 22, 2015
I "ran into" him today in front of the Physics Department building. The second button on his shirt was undone. The way his Adam's apple rolled when he spoke was exactly like when he solved a difficult problem in high school. Back in the dorm, I drew thirty-seven sketches before finally capturing that arc.
He unbuttoned his collar, remembering that day was his quantum mechanics midterm exam. The excitement of solving a difficult problem had indeed made him habitually touch his Adam's apple. This habit, which he had never even noticed, was unexpectedly etched in thirty-seven drawings.
At three in the morning, the rain stopped. Moonlight shone through the clouds, illuminating the last few pages:
May 20, 2018
The news came that he had been admitted to Princeton. I ran on the playground until I was exhausted, the starry sky shattered into spots of light in my tearful eyes. But what separated us was never just the Pacific Ocean.
December 24, 2022
The aurora borealis in Norway is beautiful, just like the interstellar magnetic field described in his paper. The editor said this photo could win an award, but I know that the truly moving thing is the unfinished dream outside the viewfinder.
The diary ended abruptly here. Chen Wang leaned against the cardboard box, letting the moonlight creep onto his fingertips. The girl who always sat quietly in the corner of the classroom, the girl who always held a camera by the basketball court, had spent ten years building a memory museum that belonged only to him.
He opened his phone and pulled out the graduation photo. After zooming in, he realized that Lin Weixi, who was at the edge of the photo, had always kept her eyes on his profile. At that time, he was smiling at the camera, completely unaware that a pair of eyes had been silently guarding him through the crowd for three whole years.
As the morning light faded, he gently closed his diary. The sound of the copper lock snapping shut was like the final punctuation of youth. Those truths, sealed by the dust of time, now transformed into the morning light, illuminating all the unspoken summers.
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