Chapter 41: “Love Adrift” Part 2

As she wiped her tears, she thought to herself—

When Mine finally messaged her, she wouldn’t reply right away. She’d make her wait days, longer than her own heartbreak. She wanted Mine to apologize, to panic for her, to feel exactly what she was feeling.

But after a while, blinking through her reddened eyes, she thought again: but…

Why was it like this?

Why did liking someone feel this way?

Liking someone should be like how her aunt, cousin, dad, and mom felt—wanting her to be well, to always be happy, unable to bear her tears, her injuries, her sadness, only hoping she stayed joyful forever.

Not like her now, immediately thinking of “revenge.”

Nor like Mine, staying silent even without a reply.

Why was this kind of liking? Why was this… kind of love?

Chi Buyu didn’t like this feeling.

But her parents always said to just be happy herself. Her late aunt had said to do what she loved.

She was certain she loved Mine.

But why did liking her cause so much pain? Why did it turn her into someone else, like a glass bottle that was hard to fill, sloshing with water inside, easily rattled dizzy by mere words or tiny things, even shattering…

If love was like this, she really didn’t like it happening, didn’t like the changes it brought her.

And as she began to anxiously realize this, she slowly noticed something that had happened even earlier—

From that day on, Mine had vanished completely.

“So your last contact was just those three messages she sent you?”

Ran Yan’s voice drifted down from above, pulling Chi Buyu back to 2024.

Chi Buyu’s arm had gone numb under her chin. She shifted it and mumbled a muffled “Mm.”

“At first, I was determined to wait for her to message me first—pretty spiteful of me. Later, when she never did, after days passed, I got really mad. I even wanted to reach out, but then I saw she’d left all the group chats. Her profile pic never lit up, she was never online. I didn’t know if she’d deleted me.”

“But Cui Qijin was with you then?” Ran Yan asked.

Chi Buyu sniffed and nodded. “She was.”

“She said she was coming on behalf of the class, but she visited every day after school. She organized notes for all the lessons I’d missed, saying the homeroom teacher told her to. When others were in the room, she barely spoke. When it was just us, she still wouldn’t look at me. Back then, I really thought she was just there on orders, that she hated it. I even told her to go home, that she didn’t need to come every day. She refused and kept coming.”

“But she never asked what happened to me. Once, I hid under the covers crying until my eyes were bright red. She must have heard, and later she saw, but she pretended not to notice. She thought I didn’t want to talk about it. I thought she had no interest in why I’d fallen or why I was crying.”

“That sounds just like Cui Qijin,” Ran Yan said.

Even Ran Yan thought so, seeing nothing amiss.

Chi Buyu’s voice was soft. “I thought so too.”

“Then you…” Ran Yan trailed off.

Chi Buyu looked at her, wiping her damp eyelashes. Her words came out nasal. “Back then, I did wonder if they were the same person.”

How could she not?

Those days, Cui Qijin showed up in her hospital room every day. Later, when Chi Buyu’s injuries had mostly healed and she returned to class, Crab Boss the class president was thrilled at how quickly she’d recovered.

That’s when she thought to ask: why did the homeroom teacher send the arts and entertainment commissioner instead of the class president?

Crab Boss looked baffled.

She prompted him. “Wasn’t it the teacher who told Cui Muhuo to bring me notes?”

“No way,” Crab Boss denied immediately. “Never heard of that. Last time I had chickenpox and stayed home, Old Ban didn’t send anyone with notes either.”

“Because chickenpox is contagious?” Chi Buyu blinked.

Crab Boss scratched his head. “Yeah, guess so.”

That suspicion faded away unresolved.

Chi Buyu thought: Could Cui Qijin have come on her own? Brought notes herself? No way. Cui Qijin, who hated being within ten meters of anyone?

Cui Qijin, who griped about even being arts and entertainment commissioner and sulked at her while pretending not to?

Huh?

There were other class reps—why would she get assigned this and come willingly every day? Be so dutiful?

And…

The more Chi Buyu thought, the stranger it seemed. Before that, hadn’t Cui Qijin asked what to say when meeting an online friend for the first time?

But how could that be?

Chi Buyu recalled all the cartoons and movies she’d seen with similar plots—mostly misunderstandings, coincidences, usually comedies that ended awkwardly or farcically. Besides, if she kept secretly thinking this way, wouldn’t it be unfair to Cui Qijin?

How could she… obsess over Cui Qijin because of someone unrelated?

Plus, Mine had vanished completely, abandoning her on the night they were supposed to meet. Despite their plans—counting down days in excitement, asking what she’d wear, scouting spots every weekend for the perfect meetup and hangout spots…

She had seen all those hopes, expectations, and thrills Chi Buyu sent eagerly, but still didn’t show, offered no reason, and never reached out again…

She shouldn’t think of her anymore, didn’t know how Mine really viewed her actions back then.

She especially shouldn’t link someone who treated her well, organizing notes, to someone who didn’t love her.

Besides, she still didn’t understand liking someone, didn’t understand love.

For a long time after, seeing idol dramas with their dramatic romances or classmates sneaking pairs-walks on the sports field made her uncomfortable.

She would shut her eyes tight, cover her ears, and hurry away, as if not fleeing fast enough would trap her back in that foolish, lovesick self.

Like a conditioned allergy.

She didn’t want to fall back into that state of being consumed by love. Sometimes, when she scrolled through her phone and saw that grayed-out profile picture along with those three glaringly obvious messages, she still felt heartbroken and devastated. She felt as though she’d never hated anyone so intensely, endlessly wondering why Mine hadn’t shown up back then.

But at other times, she wondered if she was being too demanding and selfish about love—if maybe, in that relationship, she’d messed up too…

She couldn’t make sense of how things had gone so wrong.

She was terrified that the next time love came knocking, it would end the same way.

That half-formed romance, with its bittersweet ending, had left her utterly bewildered for a long time, letting her taste the sharp tang of youthful infatuation.

She never wanted to go through it again. She didn’t want to lose herself in thoughts of “I love you,” “I want you,” “I want to love,” “I want you to love me the way I love you”…

She wanted to be the Chi Buyu who never fell in love—the one who could stand on her own, the one her aunt had warned her to be, loving herself above all else for the rest of her life—

She wanted to draw from within herself an abundance of love, enough to shield her from pain and build her confidence. She wanted to revert to a state where she made no “demands” on anyone.

And yet, she still craved it. She wanted someone who would love her without reservation for a hundred centuries, who wouldn’t abandon her over her little quirks, her moods, or her tempers.

But that was impossible.

She was a hopeless romantic. She didn’t want to be one. She went round and round in circles, like a navigator lost at sea, with no idea which way to steer.

During this aimless voyage, she met a lot of people.

She met Cui Qijin’s little sister, Yu Chenxing—

She discovered that Cui Qijin wasn’t as clever as she’d imagined, that her features weren’t as sharply defined, and that Cui Qijin… could be just as silly as anyone else. She would mimic what Chi Buyu did, pulling off foolish little stunts to protect her sister.

She learned that a drunk Cui Qijin turned into a wild mess, that she would trail quietly behind her, that she turned into a timid child when Chi Buyu got mad and wouldn’t dare speak up, that she’d reluctantly play background extra in Love Adrift just to see her excited. Turns out Cui Qijin argued like a total kid—more childish than usual, really like a little doll—and after a few drinks, she’d clutch her stomach laughing nonstop.

She reconnected with her good friend Ranran. Through Ranran, she met Cui Qijin’s college roommate, Chen Wenran—

The four of them formed this odd triangular dynamic. Chen Wenran and Ranran held down one corner. She and Cui Qijin claimed the other two, neither willing to yield.

Cui Qijin navigated back and forth through that disorienting triangle.

Then Cui Qijin found her.

—In Chongqing, where she’d gone alone for university. They shared meal after meal, and she learned how much Cui Qijin adored tropical plants, that she had a strict order for mixing her hotpot dipping sauces, that she always ate her food in a specific sequence no matter what it was, that she insisted on mangoes every time she got sick, and that she even watched something as childish as SpongeBob SquarePants. Turns out… Cui Qijin was a lone wolf at heart, too.

—In Hong Kong, where she’d gone solo for her fashion design classes. Cui Qijin had grown up so much by then; she even knew about McDull’s fish ball thick noodles. When comforting someone, she got adorably flustered like a kid, but when impatient, she’d still humor Chi Buyu by going along with the bit about a cow’s four stomachs. She’d carry Chi Buyu’s broken high heels in one hand while slipping slippers onto her feet with the other.

—In Chengdu, after she’d gotten blackout drunk at a class reunion and wandered off.

She’d gotten drunk, and the Chi Buyu who’d sworn “love is bullshit” to herself vanished. Out popped the hopeless romantic Chi Buyu, defiant and unruly, blurting out the question:

“Will there ever be someone who loves me for a hundred centuries?”

And there was Cui Qijin, who—unlike Chi Buyu herself—didn’t recoil from this lovesick version in disgust. Instead, she spoke softly to the timid romantic Chi Buyu:

“Maybe someone already has loved you for a hundred centuries.”

—On Love Adrift Street.

It was a short stretch of road you could walk end to end in ten minutes, lined with shops that had been there for a decade or more. Before 2016, it had no name. Afterward, folks started calling it Love Adrift. Chi Buyu was still that lost soul stumbling through the dark, plagued by night blindness on her endless nighttime journeys.

Cui Qijin found her here.

The first time, they were a pair of goofy tropical fish. The second, they lay side by side in the middle of the street, watching the first snow. The third, on a rainy spring night, they wheeled off in a frantic escape.

“And those second and third people… they were both Cui Qijin, weren’t they?”

It was 2024, midway down Love Adrift Street. Ran Yan leaned against the table, listening quietly as Chi Buyu finished her story, then asked softly.

Chi Buyu didn’t answer. She gazed blankly out the studio window.

Night had already fallen—darker than usual lately, wrapped in the glow of streetlamps and the haze of neon.

She remembered that snow from not long ago—how she and Cui Qijin had lain in it that night like a pair of kids, one craving a mango while the other scrambled desperately to find one.

It had been Chengdu’s first snow. Someone else was out there agonizing over love, their cries echoing as if they were the only soul left in the world. But the two of them? They lay there in the hard-won snow, blissfully oblivious—

Chi Buyu accidentally tasted a snowflake that drifted into her mouth. “Hey, snow tastes sweet!”

Cui Qijin actually mimicked her, mouth open to the sky. She tasted it too. “A little sour.”

That was the moment.

Nothing left but the snowflakes on their faces and the sheer joy sparked by one silly mango.

But sobriety came with the dawn, the snow melted away, and everyone got stuffed back into their adult shells. The runaway romantic Chi Buyu? She’d get chased off by her sensible grown-up self.

“Actually, there was snow in Chengdu the year we graduated from university too…”

Chi Buyu trailed off, blinking hard. It was spring now—no snow outside—but her eyes stung, gritty and raw.

She took off her glasses. The world blurred; the buildings under the streetlights shimmered with a hazy white glow, like the aftermath of a fresh snowfall.

“Was there? I don’t really remember.” Ran Yan seemed to search her memory, then sighed with regret.

“I do. That was the year we planned our graduation trip.”

That year, everyone around her kept saying their student days were over for good. “Chi Buyu, any unfinished business before summer hits?” It felt like if she didn’t seize the moment, it’d be gone forever—a gnawing sense of loss building up. But for her, there was one crucial thing she’d never done. She’d pondered it more than once before—

Was she anything special to Cui Qijin?

So she mustered all the courage she’d stockpiled through four years of college to finally do it.

“And…”

Chi Buyu sniffled, the sour ache flooding her entire chest. “That year, we had the graduation trip planned, and I was going to confess to her during it. But then Cui Qijin suddenly told us…”

She tugged her hood lower over her eyes, pausing for what felt like forever before murmuring in utter defeat:

“She wasn’t coming on the graduation trip.”

That Chi Buyu—the hopeless romantic who’d already flopped at her first confession, forever assuming others harbored just a flicker of affection for her…

She’d probably bolted again.

–

2024/02/14, Cloudy.

Q: Why keep your distance from Cui Muhuo?

A: That’s a secret I truly can’t put into words.

2024/03/27, Sunny.

Q: Chi Buyu, why do you keep asking and answering yourself in this diary?

A: Because I really am a hopeless romantic. So I keep trying to talk myself out of it…

Don’t fall for Cui Qijin.