On the day Chen Ya left quietly, Liu Ruyan was fighting with the air and had been hungry all day.

She didn't know whether she was asleep or fainted from hunger. When she opened her eyes, the moonlight had already climbed to the end of the road outside the window, hanging slanting beside the withered hyacinth branches and leaves.

Her stomach was growling, so she tried to bulge her belly.

It suddenly occurred to me that she had been starving like this before, and Chen Ya said fiercely that he wanted to punch her in the stomach, and suddenly he laughed and lost his temper.

Then she became sad again.

She parted with him.

Walking to the kitchen under the moonlight, she opened the refrigerator. The warm light shone on her face, and the cold air hit her face, but the emptiness in her heart felt somewhat relieved.

She ordered her troops for a long time, picked out two pieces of bread and an egg, and tried to make herself a sandwich.

I just opened the packaging bag of the bread, and a few tears fell on the bread.

The compressor of the refrigerator sounded at the right time, as if it was providing useless relief.

Liu Ruyan sobbed and wiped away her tears, feeling aggrieved and painful in her heart.

Now that I think about it, Chen Ya is a really bad person.

她一个人徘徊在湖边,他只是在那边静静看着；她鼓起小肚子,他就想往上面揍一拳；她比任何人都爱着他,他却不辞而别了.

Liu Ruyan sat on the sofa holding a sandwich. Every time she took a bite, she thought of the dreamy happy days when Chen Ya was by her side.

After finishing the sandwich, she licked her fingers in a very uncivilized manner, drank the water in the glass, and slumped down on the sofa.

The sound of water dripping from nowhere kept ringing, cicadas screamed furtively from nowhere, Liu Ruyan was lying on the sofa, and Chen Ya's voice came from nowhere, filling her head.

The moonlight was particularly quiet tonight. She stared out the window and felt that the wrinkles in her heart were slightly smoothed.

"The bright moon does not know the pain of separation and hatred, and the slanting light penetrates Zhuhu at dawn."

She suddenly remembered this poem, which seemed quite appropriate here.

She walked to the balcony and saw numerous buildings and lights in front of her.

Windows after windows form bright squares. In the squares, there are men sitting under lamps, mothers and daughters eating silently, middle-aged men singing loudly, and women mopping the floor with children on their backs.

These squares were like cross-sections of life, cut vertically and exposing the inner core to Liu Ruyan. She vaguely felt that there might be some revelations in them.

Her father used to always murmur about Wang Guowei's so-called "three realms", what "the west wind withered the green trees last night. Go up to the tall building alone and see the end of the world";

What about "the belt becomes wider and wider, but I don't regret it anymore, and I feel haggard because of the beauty";

What is "Looking for him thousands of times in the crowd, but suddenly looking back, he was in a dimly lit place."

Now that I think about it, isn't this what I mean by "going up to a tall building alone and looking at the end of the world"?

It is estimated that after some time, I will "get wider and wider and never regret it."

When can I suddenly look back and find him in a dimly lit place?

Liu Ruyan buried her face in her arms.

"Teacher, I miss you."

Maybe those who achieve great things in this world will go through a painful relationship.

The first thing Liu Ruyan did the next day was to put a book cover on the book "Love in the Time of Cholera".

She knew that this book, as Chen Ya's last gift to her (she didn't know if it could be counted, but let's just say it was), should bear witness to many, many histories.

Paper pages, like memories, will continue to turn yellow as time goes by.

Books can be protected with book covers, but how should memories be protected amid inevitable forgetfulness?

There seems to be no other way but to repeat those memories over and over again, chewing the cud like a cow, and savoring it like drinking tea.

But for Liu Ruyan now, those things were like using a knife to slowly cut holes in her heart.

In this room where her tentacles could only touch the air, but there was no sign of the teacher, any memories were a painful blow to her sensitive mind.

However, everything related to Chen Ya made her sad. His usual gold-rimmed plate, toothbrush with smoothed bristles, slippers with holes, and all of her clothes and body were everywhere in this room.

A breath that is uniquely his.

The human brain is very strange. She reminds herself not to think about him, not to think about him, but when she does this, she is thinking about him.

Longing is like a poison. When the dose is strong enough, she will be overwhelmed by grief and wish to die in her sleep.

She could only lie on the bed that was full of his scent, her hands and feet stretching out infinitely, and her green and white fingers brushing over every inch of the place where he lay, trying to find the traces he left.

She ruffled the crumpled sheets even more, and she tossed and turned to make her clothes more messy. She closed her eyes and stretched out her fingers, trying to simulate the gentle and lingering touch with the air.

She had a fever, her body temperature was so high that she couldn't even stand up.

She tried her best to dial the number of the supermarket downstairs. When the boy brought the takeaway upstairs, he noticed something was wrong at a glance.

"What's wrong with you? Do you want to go to the hospital?"

"unnecessary."

She closed the door hard and then sat down on the ground.

She was suddenly very helpless, not because she was sick, but because she suddenly thought that Chen Ya, who was somewhere in the middle of nowhere, might have met all kinds of human beings and interacted with different women.

And she had absolutely no control over it, so she could only stubbornly believe that she could wait until he came back.

After lying in bed for two days, the fever subsided and the disease was mostly recovered, but the body was still weak.

She walked slowly to the coffee table. The living room seemed to have a completely new look and feel compared to before she fell ill.

She picked up "Love in the Time of Cholera" and touched the notes left by Chen Ya on the title page.

This sentence written by Chen Ya is also a sentence in the book. It was said by a woman:

"In the final analysis, love is an instinct. Either you can do it the first time, or you will never know it in your life."

She didn't quite understand this sentence before, but now she seems to understand in her ignorance: getting along with others requires learning, but loving someone does not require learning, it is innate.

Speaking of "Love in the Time of Cholera", it is also a story about waiting.

That man waited for that woman for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days for love.

From the moment he fell in love with her, he held on to this love like a belief for his whole life.

There is no need to ask what the benefits are, and there is no need to question why you are doing this. This is faith.

Liu Ruyan feels that her love is faith, even if it seems stupid to others.

She opened the manuscript paper placed under the book. Page after page, it was filled with memories of Chen Ya.

That was the way she used to protect her memory. She would write down a little bit of her memories with him every day and read them again every day, so that he could be more deeply imprinted in her heart.

In the past few days, she had been feeling like something was about to break out of her shell.

Suddenly, she had a realization, as if all the energy in her life were suddenly connected together by a thread to piece together a complete shape.

She picked up the pen, pressed it on the paper, paused, and then wrote a line:

"Cohabitation Offside".

Then, she thought about it and wrote:

"The story begins when hyacinths bloom..."

…

One morning in March, Liu Ruyan suddenly noticed that the leaves of the hyacinth in the pot given to her by Chen Ya had been hanging down for a long time.

Before you know it, it’s the hyacinth blooming season again.

But the teacher's hyacinths were not in full bloom.

She put on her gloves and without much force, pulled up the poor plant along with its roots.

It was undoubtedly dead and the roots were rotten.

At this moment, the door opened and Chen Ya pushed the door open and came in.

Liu Ruyan thought about many scenarios of his reunion with her, but she never expected that when she saw him, she was wearing an apron and holding a rotten hyacinth in her hand.

A girl with long black hair walked out from behind Chen Ya. When she saw Liu Ruyan, she wrinkled her nose and said in blunt Chinese:

"Is this the woman you must see?"

At this time, Chen Ya only focused on looking at Liu Ruyan, and nodded while taking a break.

The girl with long black hair and straight hair walked up to Liu Ruyan, pretending to be aggressive and put her hands on her hips, as if she wanted to compete for qualifications, but also to inquire about information. After searching for words in her mind for a long time, she asked:

"How long have you and Ya been in love?"

Like Florentino Ariza, the protagonist in "Love in the Time of Cholera," she has been in love every day and night for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days (if she has that long).

Ready answers:

"For the rest of my life," she said.
Chapter completed!