Chapter 12
Later on, it was heard that Jaime and Celia went their separate ways.
Celia left the city, and Jaime, he started to pursue me.
In the morning, there was always warm milk on the desk, my favorite roasted ribs in the lunch tray during the lunch break, and the sound of footsteps three steps away when getting off work. He stubbornly reproduced our past, but he was more silent and cautious than before.
“What do you want, after all? I finally couldn’t help but ask him.”
He shook his head, the sadness in his eyes so thick it couldn’t be dissolved: “I just wanted… to be good to you.”
On the day I left the country, I only informed a few good friends.
The car drove two kilometers away, and suddenly a stumbling figure appeared in the rearview mirror.
Jaime lost his shoe and his white sock was covered in dust.
At that moment, I suddenly remembered that during the elementary school sports day, when I fell down, he also ran over to check on me.
But this time, I did not look back.
In the rearview mirror, his figure shattered into mottled patches in the autumn wind.
Jaime’s staggering pursuit resembled the old film reels we used to watch together in our childhood.
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The sound of the wind swallowed all the shouts.
The boy who once shared my childhood with me eventually turned into a trembling black dot on the horizon, and then dissipated in the September sunlight.
When the plane took off, a gap suddenly opened in the clouds.
I seemed to see sixteen–year–old Jaime standing on the school rooftop, throwing something shiny into the distance.
That was the first strawberry candy I gave him, the wrapper shining like a tiny, falling star in the sunlight.
Later, it was said that some people saw him working overtime all night at the company, while others witnessed him getting drunk at the bar.
These rumors are like faded postcards, occasionally drifting into my life and then gently passing by.
The sea breeze in Barcelona carried a salty sense of freedom.
In the second year in Spain, I received my first anonymous package.
I didn’t dismantle it, I just threw it into the storage locker.
The night when Kamden and I made our relationship official, I dreamt of my childhood, which I hadn’t thought about in a long time.
In the dream, Jaime was still in a white shirt, standing at the school gate full of pink flowers, and I didn’t look back.
When I woke up, the morning light was just breaking, and Kamden sent a photo of breakfast.
I suddenly realized that the painful and contorted face in my memory had
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Chapter 12
become so blurred that I could no longer distinguish the features.
I chose Japan for our honeymoon trip.
When the cherry blossoms fell on my shoulders, I suddenly realized that years had passed.
I looked out the window and saw a magpie pecking at something on the snowy ground.
Upon closer inspection, it was a half–melted and deformed strawberry candy.
Like the unexpressed feelings that gently buried by winter.
were not sent in time, they were finally
