Not long before I went to the Mohe Dance Hall, I felt a brief regret: I had never had a love that cut deep enough to leave a mark. For a few days I tried to find the right phrase for that kind of love. Today I think the title of a film fits better than anything I came up with: We Made a Beautiful Bouquet.
My own romance at that age happened in high school, and it ended as an all-out feud. Most of college I spent in internet cafés. My memories of those days are all World of Warcraft. I don't regret that the memories are all World of Warcraft; I only feel that my youth was missing something.
This morning the radio was still collecting submissions for a new episode on the theme of cooking. Every show starts with an outline, and this time I thought I'd recall the first meal I ever cooked. It was in an apartment I rented near campus with a college roommate.
A girl I liked in college said cafeteria food didn't feel fresh. A normal person would have asked her out to eat, right? But I chose to cook for her myself. I brought a thermos lunch box and watched her wolf it down in the cafeteria. I thought maybe she was touched.
The trouble is that inviting someone out can be repeated indefinitely. Cooking for someone, especially more than once or twice, before any relationship is defined, is a much bigger problem. The last thing I cooked for her was braised beef. One of my mischievous friends turned that box of beef into a specimen and, before graduation, even threatened to mail it to me.
At the time I was miserable. But just now, writing this, I was smiling. So perhaps it wasn't such a pity after all. I don't know whether that girl remembers this scene as an annoyance or laughs at it. I suspect she forgot long ago.
Mugi and Kinu meet because their hobbies and personalities are almost identical. Watching them, I kept thinking, How is that possible? I have met two girls whose personalities were quite close to mine, but I am like a hedgehog. When I meet someone similar, I must prick first, for no reason at all. Still, I sincerely hope to meet a girl with the same adventurous spirit as mine—even if she stabs me first.
In the end, they break up. The rational part of me understands that if I were the director or the screenwriter, I would have to break them up for the film to work. The emotional part kept praying they wouldn't—that they'd just get married. Maybe that feeling is what people call yinanping: an unresolved ache, a lingering sense of what could have been.