2023 — Steady

The first half of 2023 is the calmest stretch in the whole volume — the lowest tension readings of the reunion, a couple who had come back together and, for a few months, simply got to be in love at a distance without tearing at it. If you want to know what the two of you were like when you were well, read the spring of 2023.

Feng's needs in this season were never large, and she said so exactly:

[Feng]不过还是希望你说一句好听的

[Yu]我有一个你足够了

[Feng]你就这样一句话 对我就够了❤️💋

[Feng]我要求一点也不高：彼此关爱，彼此扶持，不说伤害的话

One of you is enough for me. I don't ask for much: to care for each other, hold each other up, and not say wounding things. Three of those four she got, most days. The fourth — not saying wounding things — was the one the distance kept taking back.

The spring is full of small games that turn, mid-play, into the real thing. A word-search image, and what each of you finds in it:

[Feng]我第一个看见的真的是Love， love is you

[Feng]🌹🌹看见自己想看见的啊😄

The first word I saw was Love — and love is you. You see what you want to see. And a Valentine's project that, of all the things in this archive, speaks most directly to the volume you are holding. Feng decided to photograph every letter Yu had ever mailed her and keep them in one private place:

[Feng]以前你给我寄的信我也要慢慢地拍照保存到这个邮箱里。等到有一天我们离开这个世界，这些也就跟着我们成为永远的秘密，不会伤害到别人🙏

[Yu]我做一个网站好了❤️🤗

[Yu]domain name你想一个

[Feng]风雨同舟

[Feng]枫宇同舟

I'll build a website. You pick the domain name. — "Through Wind and Rain, the Same Boat." "Feng-Yu, the Same Boat." You two imagined this — an archive of your own letters, sealed against the world, a secret to be carried out of life — in February 2023. That it now exists, that someone built it, that you are reading inside it: the wish was older than the thing. 风雨同舟, the same boat through wind and rain, was the name Feng gave it then. It is not a bad name for what this is.

The spring's vows are quiet and total. In June, watching nothing in particular:

[Yu]我对你的爱是不会灭绝的，已经在我生命里的，我会永远珍惜它尊重它

[Feng]那我们就永远做爱人 永远相拥🤗❤️

[Feng]Till death do our hearts part

Feng wrote that last line in English, her own remix of the wedding vow — till death do our hearts part — for two people who were not married, not to each other, and never would be. The vow was real anyway. It governed the next two years.

And the recurring misread of the whole relationship — Yu's impatience, Feng's flood of words — got, this June, one of its gentlest resolutions:

[Yu]💋我真不是为了责备你抱怨你，是想跟你说的话憋着说不出来着急了

[Feng]爱你❤️💋我也完全不是不care你的反应和comment，而是着急把事情叙述完

[Yu]我理解了

[Yu]以后我多吱声

I wasn't reproaching you — I just couldn't get the words out and got anxious. — I wasn't ignoring your reaction either, I was just rushing to finish the story. — I understand. From now on I'll speak up more. When the two of you were calm, you could see each other's machinery perfectly. The tragedy of the later years is not that you stopped understanding. It is that understanding stopped being enough.

By high summer the heat was rising again — toward the autumn that would hold everything at once.

---