The Slow Cooling

The spring of 2022 is the part of the year that hands itself to Volume Two, and it does so almost imperceptibly, the way a tide goes out — no single dramatic withdrawal, just water that is lower every time you look. The affection readings settle into the low tens and stay there. The anger readings, which began the year near nothing, are now consistently the highest they have been. And the fights have changed character. In the summer they had been about the two of you — about words and comfort and being seen. By spring they are increasingly about the world, the one subject on which the two of you would never agree, and which Volume Two would eventually let burn the whole thing down.

The clearest of these is a long March night that began, fatally, with Yu trying to be kind. He sent a goodnight, a 心疼你, a take care of yourself; Feng, awake and full of feeling about the war in Ukraine, asked him one political question; and the night unspooled into hours:

[Feng]支持独裁者 不是我认识的周宇

[Yu]你关心的就是追着让我附和你？

[Yu]我累了，明天说吧

Supporting a dictator — that's not the Yu I know. — All you care about is chasing me down to make me agree with you? I'm tired, let's talk tomorrow. And later, worn to the bone, the line that names the spring's whole disease:

[Yu]我蛮好不问候你就没有这些枝节了

[Yu]睡前心疼你一下，就这结果

If I'd just not greeted you at all, none of this would have branched off. I felt for you before bed, and this is the result. That is the cruelty of the cooling. In the summer, a goodnight was a goodnight. By spring, a goodnight could trigger four hours of war. Yu began to learn that the safest thing was to say less — and saying less is, exactly, the temperature dropping. The conversation closed, as these now did, not in repair but in a kind of mutual surrender:

[Feng]我不生气，谢谢你回我话💋

[Feng]别生气

I'm not angry, thank you for answering me. Don't be angry. Not resolved. Just set down.

The spring also kept its anniversaries, and the two of you marked them quietly. In early April, looking back at a poem Yu had posted a year before, you both worked out together when it had been written — and the date located a parting:

[Feng]那时我们刚告别😭

[Yu]是啊

[Yu]刚刚从SD回来

[Feng]嗯

[Yu]🤗

That was right after we'd said goodbye. — Yes. Just back from San Diego. — Mm. The whole architecture of the relationship is in those five lines — the few real days together in one city, San Diego, and then the long return to the screen, and a poem written into the gap. By the spring of 2022 the two of you measured time this way as a matter of course: not by months, but by the partings between the meetings.

And yet the spring is not loveless — it is, in fact, where the two of you did some of your most articulate thinking about what love even was, as if you sensed it needed defending now. In May, over Fromm's The Art of Loving, Yu wrote out his definition of the word, and it is one of the most complete things he ever said:

[Yu]当我说“我爱你”，我的vision是：你活得充实、喜悦、被爱的温暖光照、人生有实现和不断的新收获、觉得每天好有意义好值得。我也希望自己是这样。我相信我们的关系就是最积极的一种。

When I say "I love you," my vision is: that you live a full life, joyful, lit by the warmth of being loved, with achievement and new gains, feeling every day is meaningful and worth it. I wish the same for myself. I believe ours is the most positive kind of relationship there is. And in the same conversation, the diagnosis he kept returning to all year, said now with the resignation of someone who has accepted it as a permanent condition:

[Yu]我们在一起实地的相处太少，所以才有猜疑疑惑

[Yu]如果是同在一地，经常能见，才不会因为网上的事情闹纠纷

We've had too little real time together in one place, and that's why there's suspicion and doubt. If we lived in one place and saw each other often, we wouldn't fight over things on the internet. The whole tragedy of the distance, stated flatly, in May 2022, by a man who had stopped expecting it to change.

The spring also holds the moment that should be set beside Volume Two's "closed his feed" passage, because it is the same act, beginning here, two years early. In late June Yu told Feng he had shut off his WeChat Moments browsing — not yet as a wall against her, but as a way of saving his own time and attention:

[Yu]以后这种channels就不用转给我了，谢谢你💋别生气

[Yu]我只是想多节省点时间，不在无意义的事情上浪费

[Feng]我没有生气啊

[Yu]单独点开你的头像打开朋友圈仍然是可以看和点赞的

[Yu]只是不像以前打开Moments那样浏览所有人的朋友圈。这样节省很多精力。

Don't forward me these channels anymore, thanks, don't be upset. I just want to save time, not waste it on meaningless things. — I'm not upset. — Your feed I can still open and like directly; I just don't browse everyone's the way I used to. It saves a lot of energy. In Volume Two, the closed feed becomes 疏离, growing distant, a wall built on purpose, and Feng names it as the death of the thing. Here, in June 2022, it is only a man tired of noise, choosing to look at less. The door that would later shut began, gently, to swing here.

By the last week of June the two of you had settled into a rhythm that was lower and quieter than the summer before, but unbroken. The friend-fights still flared — there was one on the sixteenth that could have been transcribed word-for-word from November 2021, the same Yunfan, the same screenshots, the same 我永远都不对, I'm never in the right — and there were calm late nights too, the budget worked out together, the children's tuition, the practical love of two people planning around money and distance. On the twenty-third, past midnight, Yu confessed the thing under the worry:

[Yu]钱是我心底的痛

[Feng]🤗🤗

[Yu]在我没有预算去做那些完美计划的时候，我能怎么做？

Money is the ache at the bottom of my heart. When I don't have the budget for all those perfect plans, what am I supposed to do? And Feng, who had arrived in America with seven hundred dollars, told him so, and told him their children would be fine, and they talked until the small hours about how each of you had once been twenty-five with nothing. It is not the heat of the summer. It is something else — two people who know each other's whole histories, keeping each other company in the dark. The affection was down by a fifth. The anger was up by most of a hundred percent. The reply times had not moved an inch. And the two of you were still there, every night, until one in the morning.

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