“You know what? Paul asked me to go out for a dinner, and I told him…”

No.

“—yes.”

My sight blurred, buzzing sound haunting my ears. I was dazed, but meanwhile sober enough to process her words—a date. She is having a date. I comprehended her words but could not yet digest them—they were turned into thousands of butterflies, fluttering and crashing into each other in my stomach.

The world fell into silence until she spoke again, voice lowered by an octave:

“Look, I’m sorry if I just reminded you of…that person. I didn’t mean to, really. I just got—overjoyed, perhaps.” She glanced at me, but I fixed my eyes on the road—they were not yet reddened, but soon, and unfocused already. She sighed, “But seriously, maybe you should—tell her. In fact, I can no longer bear seeing you so…depressed.”

“Oh,” I mumbled, throat dry and itchy, “yeah. I’ll consider that.”

No. Never.

It had been over 200 hundred days: more than 200 days since my realization, and many more since the actual start—the start of falling in love.

There was no definite moment of the so-called beginning: each moment dragged me down one inch. Probably the first time was when we sat side by side in the humming airplane, lights off, my head laying on the crook of her neck; the second time was when I walked out of the bathroom, seeing her lying in the bed, white comforter to her neck, hair fanned on the pillow. Then there were the third, the fourth, and the fifth, until I could hardly count, but the number kept increasing. I was already in the abyss.

Like most people in love, I had midnight talks with all my best friends—including her—about it, but only vaguely saying that I was in love with someone; I put my hand on my cheek and tilted my head to look at her during classes; My ears heated up for her each wink, smile, or simple stare. Unlike most people, confession never came to my mind as a choice, even though we were so intimate.

My rationality was holding me back.

I knew that I was nothing more than a teenager—naïve and powerless, spoiled by the conservatory named school. Whether I could get into a top university, whether I could find a profitable job, whether I could settle in a comfortable neighborhood…were all unforeseeable. I could be responsible for nothing, definite about nothing, but helpless at anything. The future could be a ferocious sea, but I did not even own a boat—

So how could I ask her to sail with me?

Also, she deserved better—she was better: better at physics, chemistry, piano, sports, and even nail polishing.

Reasonably, for the first several months, my rationality was in general control, allowing my emotions to take the steering wheel only occasionally. I lived my normal days, waiting for all the heart-racing, eye-widening, and ear-reddening to subside naturally, until—

“I think I want to go to Britain, like Cambridge or Oxford, you know. I’ve long been thinking about it.” She said, joyfully, innocently, and sincerely.

And everything backfired in a flash. The originally plummeting emotions suddenly peaked higher than Himalayas. I dreadfully realized that it was less than two years—in less than two years we will be separated by a distance larger than our planet’s diameter. Buried in my schoolwork, I will have no time, no ways, no reasons or courage to ever meet her.

The thought of confession, gradually and miserably, floated into my mind. Every tickle on the clock reminded me that it was a now-or-never matter. But every time the words crawled up my throat, my brain would suddenly take over and strangle them.

What on earth is love about? What should I do to love properly? If love’s ingredients are a sacrificed heart, a sealed mouth, and a pair of always-focused eyes, I was undeniably the perfect cook for it. I refused selfishness—refused anything that would hurt, bother, or even confuse her. But to meet this high standard—to render this love 100% “pure”—I myself would suffer.

I suffered. 

I dreamed of her. She came into my dreams, always gorgeous but distant, talking joyfully with people I barely knew about. She raised her eyebrows, sent out genuine laughters, but did not bother to glance at my direction. I wanted to walk to her, but my feet were rooted into the ground; I opened my mouth, but something got stuck in my throat and each of my syllables was muted. All of a sudden, I would wake up, with wet bang and eyelashes.

Everything was a catalyst. A poem, a song, a look or a word, when reached my mind, all dissolved into pure bitterness. Whoever’s unrequited love stories could be the cause of my own sorrow. When I saw her smile—her nose wrinkled, mouth wide-open—I became torn in halves: half of myself felt genuine happiness for her, while the other half questioned resentfully why I was the only one to suffer, while she enjoyed everything so ignorantly.

Then it was like a drop of ink got mixed into a lucid pond—the whole picture became tainted. I became contradictory—whipped and disgusted, smitten and frightened, replete with affection and hatred, all at the same time. Those feelings, together with other unnamed but equally powerful ones, plundered my whole mind and brain. From time to time, I felt shivers being sent up to my spine, either triggered by the feelings themselves or the terrifying realization of their presence.

I kept sinking, letting those tangled emotions get my consciousness trapped, until I felt that I could go no further—I had been pushed to the edge. I was like a geyser before eruption but being sealed at the top, seeking desperately for an outlet, and my inside was screaming—say it out.

So there came the lunch break walk: we walked in the shadow of trees, a draft of speech being scribbled, erased, and rephrased in my stomach. When we took the fifth turn and I decided to say whatever was prepared in my mind on the next, she opened her mouth first.

All my words were, again, strangled and ground to dust, and at that moment I felt the same for my heart.

That night I went home curling on my bed, my comforter pulled up to cover my head, and cried uglily. But after all those tears, when I finally put my head properly on the stained pillow, I seemed to find back a trace of long-lost peace—some of the disturbances in my mind miraculously ceased.

That night was dreamless. The next morning, I woke up to find the shadow she cast in my mind lighter. Day by day, her figure faded from a shadow to a lighter shadow, eventually to a transparent, tenous mist. Whenever I thought about her, picturing her dating her boyfriend, the mist would conjure a thin feeling of melancholy. But the melancholy was soon readily dismissed, as I knew that I couldn't let it block my road ahead.