2022 — Return

The first tender line of the reunion is Feng's, and it is about walking.

Feng was about to fly to Oregon. Yu, who had once lived there, told her she might be retracing his old footsteps without knowing it — that at the least the two of you could see the same scenery at different times, and call that a kind of contact.

[Yu]Oregon非常漂亮，是全美我最心仪的地方

[Yu]也许你去的地方有我以前的足迹呢

[Yu]至少，我们可以在不同的时间看到一样的风景，也是一种沟通呢

[Feng]走过你走过的路，算不算相拥🤗

[Yu]算

Walking the road you walked — does that count as a hug? It counts. That is the whole problem and the whole solution of the reunion in five lines. The two of you were never in the same place. So you built embraces out of substitutes — a shared road, a shared moon, a shared minute — and you agreed, by fiat, that they counted. For three years you kept that agreement.

The missing of each other was immediate and physical. A week into the reunion, out of nowhere, with nothing prompting it, Feng wrote the plainest confession of the year:

[Feng]我怎么再也找不到能够让我像喜欢你一样喜欢的人了呢😭

[Yu]我心里有你在，绝对不会去找别人谈情说爱的

[Feng]谢谢你。我爱你❤️

Why can I never again find anyone I could love the way I love you? Yu answered, as he would answer all year, with fidelity — and later distilled it to a definition: 爱你就是不爱别人的意思, to love you means not to love anyone else.

You both already knew the shape of your trouble, and you named it early. In July, Yu wrote the diagnosis the whole volume would prove:

[Yu]吵架还是当面吵最好，只会吵一两句，一吻一抱就化解了，这样隔着千山万水，自己都把自己吵得昏头昏脑

[Feng]不吵了😅

[Feng]🤗🤗💋💋❤️❤️

Quarrels are best had face to face — a line or two, one kiss, one hug, and they dissolve; like this, across ten thousand miles, you argue yourself dizzy. The reunion's central ache, stated in July 2022 and never solved: the fights festered precisely because they were typed. A body in the room would have ended them. There was no body in the room.

So the tenderness, when it came, was often the tenderness of repair. The year's worst night was Christmas Eve. Feng said the thing that cuts deepest — that Yu's picture of the future had no room in it for her:

[Feng]梦想我们每年能有几个星期一起周游世界

[Feng]不是拿走我什么，而是你对未来的计划和期盼里根本没有我啊

[Yu]我会说，那我去每个地方找你，跟你重逢在每个城市

[Yu]给你拍照片，写blog

[Feng]是啊

And then, on Christmas morning, the whole storm resolved into three words and a correction:

[Yu]对不起，你不是别人

[Feng]❤️❤️

[Feng]包饺子吧，大家一起 不要一个人辛苦了

I'm sorry — you are not "other people." You are not just anyone. That phrase, 你不是别人 / 你不是任何人, recurs across all three years; it is the sentence Yu reaches for whenever he needs to tell Feng she is not interchangeable. It is, in a sense, the thesis of his whole devotion: everyone else is anyone; you alone are someone.

In September, near the date of your first meeting five years before, Feng did the math of the relationship out loud, and Yu answered it with the idea that organizes the entire reunion:

[Feng]我们五年纪念日了呀❤️❤️

[Feng]天天吵架 居然也坚持下来了。我们真不容易，给我们自己点赞加油

[Feng]嗯，我们在机场吻别 我还记得清清楚楚💋💋💋

[Yu]我爱你，我们的见面才是自己的时空，其他时候是静止的，封存在心里，是等待用吻重新唤醒的睡美人

Our meetings are the only time that is truly ours; everything else is frozen, sealed in the heart, a sleeping beauty waiting for a kiss to wake it. Five years in, fighting every day, you had nonetheless lasted — and you had found a way to think about the distance that made it bearable: the time apart was not real time. It was suspended animation between the few real days. The whole reunion was an attempt to live on those few days' worth of oxygen.

The fights were already the fights the rest of the volume would keep having. There was the disclosure fight — Yu getting a medical test and not telling Feng, Feng naming her standard, 凡事有交代、事事有回应, everything accounted for, every message answered. There was the political fight, opposite leanings grinding against each other, which Yu tried to defuse at its root:

[Yu]我最初跟你开始，是因为你的智慧

[Yu]不是你的政治倾向

[Yu]就算你是川粉也没有关系的

What drew me to you was your mind, not your politics — even if you were a Trump fan it wouldn't matter. He meant it as bedrock. The coming years would test it to destruction. But in 2022 the creed still held, and Yu could still write, in August, the line that reads now like the reunion's founding optimism:

[Yu]最不好的时候都过去了，后面只会越来越好

The worst is behind us; from here it only gets better. He was half right. It got better first.

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