Yu Ze'an · Chat

"Yu Ze'an, why don't you get a girlfriend?" He sat at his workstation, holding a pencil, the tip resting motionless on the drafting paper. "No time," he said. "You work overtime every day, so yeah, you really don't have time." He gave a brief smile. It was fleeting—a twitch of the lips, but his eyes remained still. "Not exactly." He put down his pencil, leaned back against his chair, and looked out at the skyline outside the window. "Just haven't met the right one." His colleague didn't ask further. What they didn't know was that when Yu Ze'an said "haven't met the right one," a specific face appeared in his mind. That face belonged to someone at three years old, at two years old, smiling while biting into a popsicle. He had remembered it for twenty-one years. He would never tell anyone. He lowered his head and continued drawing. The pencil rustled softly against the drafting paper, drawing one straight line, then another. He drew them very straight, without a ruler. He had drawn straight lines for so many years that his hand already remembered how the line should go. But his life was not a straight line. His life was a winding alleyway—narrow, old, with no end in sight. He had walked it for twenty-four years, and he was still walking. He didn't know what lay at the end. All he knew was that she was there. Somewhere at the very end. He walked slowly, unhurriedly. He was afraid that if he walked too fast and reached the end, she wouldn't be there. He lowered his head and continued drawing. The pencil rustled softly, sounding like the words he spoke in his heart. There were too many of those words—endless, and impossible to say out loud. He could only draw them on paper. Drawing them into lines, into planes, into silent buildings, one after another. Buildings cannot speak, but they stand there. Standing for a long time, waiting for someone to look. That was just how he was. He couldn't speak, but he would stand there. Standing for a long time, waiting for her to come and look.