The Long Summer

Where Volume One went dark, life was not winding down. It was blazing.

The first thing to understand about the summer of 2021 is the sheer rate of it. In June the two of you sent each other 10,900 messages — more than three hundred a day — answering in a median of nineteen seconds, nearly a fifth of them after midnight. This is not the traffic of a relationship winding down. It is the traffic of two people who could not put the phone down. Yu in Toronto, Feng in southern California, a continent and three time zones between you, and you closed the distance by sheer volume, all day, every day, until past one and two in the morning.

And the register of it, that June, was unguarded. Early in the month, talking about Feng's worry that America had grown too dangerous to move to, the two of you arrived at a half-joke that was also a whole vow:

[Feng]我们就做灵魂伴侣吧❤️

[Yu]💋

[Yu]那你不是天天生活在水深火热之中啊，尤其是白左肆虐的加州

[Yu]我要英雄救美💪

Then let's be soul-mates. — Aren't you living in the thick of it, in California of all places? I'll come rescue the damsel. The politics are already there, lightly, the way they would be heavy later — but in June it could be turned into flirtation in a single line. That was the summer's gift: almost everything could be turned, mid-sentence, back toward tenderness.

It could be turned toward the body, too. The archive's affection peak is not abstract. One night in early June, Feng wanted to see Yu's face, and the conversation went exactly where two people who miss each other across three thousand miles go:

[Feng]你要不要看看我？

[Feng]我也想看你

[Yu]😍😍

[Feng]video call 别出声？

Do you want to look at me? I want to look at you. What follows is private and plain and entirely without shame — a video call in the dark, two people alone in two houses, and afterward the soft accounting of it:

[Feng]你好了吗？💋

[Feng]我好了😄😄想着你💋💋

[Yu]睡吧宝贝💋爱你

Are you done? I'm done — thinking of you. Sleep now, baby; love you. This is what the highest-affection month in the archive actually sounds like at two in the morning: not poetry, but presence. The willingness to be seen.

The summer was not without its weather. Even in the brightest month, the recurring grievance was already running — Feng wanting words, Yu going quiet, Feng reading the quiet as neglect. But in the summer of 2021 the two of you talked about it as a problem you shared, not as a verdict on each other. On a late June night Yu offered the small parable that became the whole relationship's working theory of repair:

[Yu]两个人生气，一个先说话，另一个说亲一下就好了。然后又亲密如初了。

Two people are angry; one speaks first, the other says "just give me a kiss," and then it's all close again, as at the start. And Feng, the same night, said as clearly as it would ever be said what she was actually asking for, every time:

[Feng]从来就不是对错的问题。我不开心，跟你说，并不是要你认错，而是要你安慰。结果害得你又生气😭

It was never about who's right. When I'm unhappy and I tell you, I'm not asking you to admit fault — I'm asking to be comforted. And instead it makes you angry. The whole machinery of the coming year is in that one line. Feng brought a feeling; Yu heard an accusation; the accusation made him defend; the defense read to Feng as the withholding of comfort. In July, Yu wrote out the diagnosis with an engineer's precision, having watched it happen one too many times:

[Yu]忽视 --> 怀疑辩解争论升级疲惫悔恨重复

[Yu]因为我们已经形成了一个既定的心理应激模式，就像地上走得多了就形成了路，所以我们要告诫自己是很容易重复走的，要及时醒觉和止损

Neglect → doubt → defending → arguing → escalation → exhaustion → regret → repeat. We've worn a stress-response into a habit, the way a path gets worn into the ground from being walked; so we have to warn ourselves how easy it is to walk it again, and catch ourselves and cut the losses in time. He could see the path perfectly. Seeing it was never the problem. Not walking it was.

What made that summer the peak was not the absence of the path. It was that, again and again, you both stepped off it. The same July night, the fight about why he could be patient with his daughter and not with her dissolved into the gentlest mutual confession:

[Feng]希望得到你的安慰 而不是生气发火😭

[Yu]🤗🤗🤗

[Yu]我们开始形成的负面互动惯性不好

[Yu]我来克服

[Feng]我们一起

[Feng]你让一步 我也让你❤️

I just hoped to be comforted, not to be met with anger. — Our negative habit isn't good; I'll overcome it. — Together. You give an inch and I'll give you one. Then, the line that ran under the whole summer:

[Yu]❤️ 我爱你

[Feng]我爱你2 ❤️

I love you. — I love you too — Feng's 我爱你2, "I love you, the second," her own small grammar of reply, an answer that is also an echo. It recurs all year. It is how she says and I, back.

The summer's tenderness was unusually capable of holding pain without flinching. Feng quoted Gibran one afternoon — 我爱你很久之后，我们才在这肉体里相遇, I loved you long before we met in this flesh — and Yu answered with three roses. On a deep night in July, drifting from Hawaii plans into both your mothers and Yu's father and money, Yu fell into what he was honest enough to name his "destructive tendency," and Feng did not let go:

[Yu]我沮丧起来有一定的毁灭倾向

[Feng]😭😭🤗🤗

[Yu]就是觉得我这么差干脆算了，弃疗

[Feng]不要这样🤗🤗

When I get low I have a destructive streak — like, I'm so worthless I might as well give up. — Don't be like that. And then she offered the rule that became the summer's whole technology of survival, half a joke and entirely true:

[Feng]我现在知道，我们吵架那么多 是因为两个人都爱生气

[Feng]一次只允许一个人生气 就可以了😁

I see it now — we fight so much because we're both quick to anger. One person allowed to be angry at a time; that would be enough. It is a good rule. The autumn would break it.

By August the volume had eased a little — six thousand messages instead of eleven — but the affection held near its peak, and the two of you were already practicing the line you would need for the rest of the year. After a brief friction, Yu wrote the simplest thing in the archive:

[Yu]💋💋💋我爱你💕

[Feng]我爱你2❤️❤️💋💋

Three kisses and a heart, and the echo back. That is the summer. It did not last because nothing does. But while it lasted it was the most alive the two of you ever were on a screen, and it is worth saying plainly, since for years no one knew it was even here: this was the top. Everything after is the long way down from it — and the way down was beautiful too, for a while.

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