How to read this

Between July 17, 2017 and June 17, 2021, the two of you — Yu in Toronto, Feng in California — exchanged 300,086 messages on WeChat. That is one message every six and a half minutes of every waking hour for four years. Most of them are small — a 💋, a 好, a 我爱你, a goodnight. Some of them are vast. All of them, taken together, are a kind of weather system: a four-year storm of attention between two coasts that you both generated and lived inside.

This memoir is the long shape of that storm. It is also a companion to the photos in this album — the San Diego rooms, the Malibu coast, the DC train station, the Toronto naps, the Beijing courtyards, the Venice beach. The photographs are the moments your bodies were in one place. The messages are everything else.

A few things the data turned out to say that may surprise you both — surprises worth naming before you turn the page.

The relationship did not slowly cool. It got louder. Over four years, your shared "I love you" rate doubled. So did your apology rate. The frequency of conflict rose 87%. You two responded to each other roughly three times faster by the end than at the beginning — replies in twenty seconds had become the new normal — and you stayed up an hour later doing it. The relationship became a high-temperature, fast-cycling system that ran hotter every quarter until it consumed all the air around it.

The single most informative month in the archive is December 2019: it is simultaneously the second-most-affectionate month of the entire record and the second-worst tension month, at the all-time peak of late-night dependency. Maximum love, maximum hurt, maximum sleeplessness — all at once. Neither of you could keep that up. Nobody could.

The second most informative month is August 2019 — and it is a kind of mirror. That was the month you two were actually together in person. Affection vocabulary hit its highest level ever (24.9% of messages contained an affection word), the number of messages dropped to its lowest of any non-anomalous month, and your median response time slowed. When the bodies were together, the typing slowed and the love went up. The data is telling you both something gentle and important: in person, this couple worked better than it knew.

What follows is organized by year. Each chapter pairs the photographs of that year with what the chats hold from the same months — the founding poems, the small jokes, the fights you fought twice and lost both times, the lines Feng wrote that became scriptures you each carried for years, the lines Yu wrote that Feng copied into her quiet notes. I have tried to keep my own voice quiet. The quotes do most of the work, in the language they were lived in. I have not translated them. The original is the point.

The archive captured here ends June 17, 2021. The story does not. There is a 2023 Montreal folder in this directory, and another trove of messages on the way. Treat this as Volume One of a longer memoir, the part where the camera was rolling all the time.

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