Xie Yichen went to MIT for his spring research stint. For the whole of junior year second semester, the two of them were in a long-distance relationship across countries—their time zones completely reversed. To accommodate Ning Sui’s schedule, Xie Yichen always video called her during her evenings.
Both were very busy. Half an hour of video call a day wasn’t nearly enough—by the time they’d finished recounting the day’s events it was practically used up. Yet they still couldn’t help wanting to see each other. Sometimes they’d just stay connected—not talking at all, just needing to be able to look up and find the other there.
Ning Sui propped her phone against the wall in an unobtrusive spot, angled only toward herself. Then she put in her earbuds and sat at her desk working through a mathematical theorem.
In the dormitory, her roommates moved around, chatted briefly, then each went back to their own things—completely accustomed to this form of long-distance public display of affection.
From the earbuds, the warm, low current of his breath drifted through, and then she heard him call: “Ning Sui.”
The rare use of her full name.
As though she’d done something wrong. Ning Sui gave a start and immediately looked up.
Xie Yichen’s expression was blank. His cool voice came through the earbuds: “Why did a guy just kiss you?”
Ning Sui blinked in confusion. Then she remembered—Bi Jiaxi had recently had a sudden impulse to get a bob haircut, but the hairdresser had gotten a little carried away with the scissors, and the result made her look rather like a tomboyish kid. She’d just leaned over and pressed a playful kiss to Ning Sui’s cheek.
“……That’s my dormmate.”
Xie Yichen paused, pivoted quickly: “A girl doesn’t count either.”
Those sharp dark eyes swung lazily toward her, fixing on her: “Only I’m allowed to kiss you.”
Ning Sui: “……”
When a video call wasn’t an option, they just texted and shared their daily lives in writing.
Ning Sui knew the food on his end was a world apart from back home. Bacon and eggs and fruit for breakfast, sausages with lettuce and beans for lunch, and at dinner—when he truly couldn’t take it anymore—he’d head to Chinatown with classmates for a proper Chinese meal.
When mealtimes came around, she’d quietly photograph her Beijing University cafeteria tray—colorful and fragrant—and send it over.
Sui-sui-sui: [Giving you a glimpse of exceptional Chinese culinary culture [cat peeking gif]]
He was practically laughing through his exasperation on the other end.
Oreo: [I’m eating boiled plain cabbage. Ning Coconut, are you trying to starve your boyfriend?]
Ning Sui sent over a few boxes of delicate pastries her mom had mailed her: [Want some? I’ll ship them to you.]
Oreo: [Don’t want them. I’ll go buy a coconut later.]
Ning Sui felt like laughing: [No, I’m serious.]
Oreo: [Really shipping? Postage is expensive.]
He was going to be away for half a year—several holidays would pass. She couldn’t have nothing to offer.
Sui-sui-sui: [That’s fine. Point out whichever one you want.]
Sui-sui-sui: [Any of them, or all of them [cat bouncing gif]]
He answered with characteristic laziness: [Then I’ll say one thing]
Sui-sui-sui: [Okay okay]
Oreo: [Want the green one. Cute. Soft.]
Ning Sui looked around her desk. The cute soft green thing—that was probably the little rabbit candy from Japan that Fanghui had brought back from her business trip. But it wasn’t green, which was puzzling.
She was about to ask, when she looked down and saw her own light green little dress.
“……”
He said, with meaningful implication: [Can you ship it to me?]
Long-distance, it could be said, is always just an undercurrent of restless longing.
Ning Sui occasionally got together for small group meals with Hu Ke’er, Zhang Yuge, and Lin Shuyu. At the table Zhang Yuge would naturally take on the role of intermediary—chatting at length about things he’d heard concerning Xie Yichen, and ferrying Ning Sui’s daily life back across the distance.
Things like the open academic culture there, amusing things that happened while doing research with his advisor, and stories among the Chinese student community.
Most of these Xie Yichen had already told her himself. But hearing them again from a different person, Ning Sui still found it entertaining in its own way—as though she’d participated in his life through this route once more.
The four of them gathered roughly every week or two, talking about anything and everything under the sun.
Around that time, a direct-track doctoral student in the Mathematics department, three years ahead of Ning Sui, had developed feelings for her. Seeing that Xie Yichen was abroad, he made various overt and covert attempts to wedge his way in.
Ning Sui spotted it the moment it started and turned him down clearly. From then on she avoided any situation where she might run into him, and left his WeChat messages unread.
Xie Yichen had a lot going on overseas; she hadn’t wanted to tell him. But then Hu Ke’er, that unreliable person, let it slip by accident, and Zhang Yuge—that shameless opportunist—went and passed it straight on.
And in an embellished version, no less: “The guy’s the top GPA in the department, and apparently he and Ning Sui met way back when they were introduced by a mentor during freshmen orientation training—they’ve known each other a while——”
Zhang Yuge heard a rapid series of crashing sounds in the background. Xie Yichen was currently at the indoor basketball court playing a game—MIT versus Harvard—and it was apparently halftime, leaving him free to answer the phone.
The other end said nothing. It was impossible to judge the atmospheric pressure.
Hm, holding it together pretty well—composed, emotionally stable, unruffled. Impressive.
Zhang Yuge, though he loved watching a good drama unfold, did have a sense of where to stop. He pulled back before going too far, recounted everything accurately from start to finish, and added: “Of course, that guy is now sitting quietly in Ning Sui’s blocked list. You can relax, absolutely nothing happened.”
The other end finally deigned to make a sound—one short, quiet syllable—his voice still carrying the roughness from the recent exertion. Flat, no discernible emotion: “Game’s starting. Hanging up.”
Zhang Yuge didn’t usually call him; he’d barely gotten through a few minutes of enthusiastic talking before the line was going to drop. He thought about it: long distance really wasn’t easy, with such limited ways to stay connected. He hadn’t seen his brother’s face in months—and truth be told, he actually missed him.
Never mind him.
Ever since Xie Yichen had gone abroad, two or three months in, even the anonymous campus message board wasn’t quite the same. That crowd who used to hate seeing couple posts had actually emerged, uncharacteristically: [Whatever happened to those two? Haven’t heard anything in a while.]
Someone replied below: [The main characters are in long-distance now qaq]
So Zhang Yuge, unabashedly: “Don’t hang up. Let me at least listen to some background noise. We can keep talking when you’re on your next break.”
“……”
Xie Yichen was genuinely made to laugh despite himself, jaw tight as he cursed: “You called an international line to listen to white noise. Are you out of your mind?”
Zhang Yuge, swaggering: “So what? I’m paying for this call!”
“……”
Honestly, he did mean it sincerely.
After this long apart, wasn’t he allowed to be a little sentimental?
Zhang Yuge said, with a mournful tilt: “Brother, you need to be honest with yourself too. Being alone over there—don’t you miss us? Long-distance must feel pretty insecure, right? You can only look at your girlfriend’s photos and not actually touch her, that must be hard——”
Before he could finish, the call cut off.
Zhang Yuge: “……”
He couldn’t help heaving a sigh.
Back in Huai’an, they’d practically been inseparable—playing basketball every few days. Even in Beijing, it had been at least twice a month. But this whole semester they’d gone months without his brother dunking on him. Zhang Yuge missed it terribly.
So he pressed the phone to his ear and strained to listen.
——Xie Yichen, considerate to the end, hadn’t actually hung up. He’d just put his phone down on a chair nearby. So now Zhang Yuge could hear the referee’s whistle and the roaring, lively atmosphere of the court. Zhang Yuge couldn’t help picturing it vividly in his mind.
His brother was the kind of person who fit in effortlessly wherever he went.
Clearly doing well overseas too, had made a lot of friends.
Made sense—he always had a way of drawing attention.
He was still daydreaming when from the other end of the line came a sudden sharp crack, followed by a rattling, clattering cascade of sounds, as though something glass-like had shattered and fallen all over the floor.
Then what sounded like several foreign guys collectively gasping, their voices raised: “Holy shit!”
Zhang Yuge wanted to know what was happening but was helpless—Xie Yichen’s phone was on the chair, he could only stand there listening and feeling anxious: “What happened, what happened?!”
He’d braced himself to wait restlessly through the rest of the second half, but less than ten minutes later, Xie Yichen’s low, unreadable voice came back through the receiver: “——Hello.”
Zhang Yuge: “What, your game’s over?”
“Can’t play anymore.”
Zhang Yuge: “?”
Xie Yichen, in a tone of resigned irony, uttered a rare profanity: “I just shattered the backboard.”
Zhang Yuge: “??”
On Ning Sui’s end, she had absolutely no idea about her boyfriend’s heroic exploit.
The main priority this semester was the external department graduate school application—written exams, interviews—and since Computer Science was particularly demanding, she had to prepare rigorously, often going with Bi Jiaxi to study in the library.
With someone missing, her heart felt like a piece of it had been scooped out. The only thing she could do was try to fill her days with activities, keep herself busy, and redirect her focus.
The drama club was starting a new production this semester. She took on a supporting role and kept attending rehearsals as usual. The official performance was in late March.
But even that was only treating the symptoms, not the cause.
Sometimes she missed him so much that sending messages wasn’t enough to ease it. Distance made longing stretch further and further. Sometimes in the middle of the night Ning Sui would curl up under her blanket and secretly scroll through their old chat history.
She went through considerable effort, verifying her identity through various means, and finally recovered her account on the mathematics tutoring forum.
She had to commend the website—messages from years ago were still preserved in perfect condition. His profile picture was a vast, deep expanse of starry sky. His username: Nathan.
It was only now that Ning Sui saw the final messages in the chat log had all come from him.
Over the span of roughly a month, he’d checked in every few days. When she never replied, the messages had simply stopped—the last one left at the very end of September of her senior year of high school.
[If anything comes up, just send me a message.]
Ning Sui’s chest tightened. She swiped upward and kept reading.
She hadn’t known, until now, how much they’d talked about—and she’d even said things like that herself, things she’d almost forgotten. Her heart felt like it was surging with a hot current as she went through them one by one.
1212Coconut: [I’m so sorry, my comprehension might genuinely not be strong enough. Could you please explain this problem once more? I’m really sorry to trouble you [tears emoji]]
Nathan: [The number of paths of length three that start at some vertex in a subset U has a simple lower bound, which is exactly a transformation of the inequality in the problem. Is that description clear enough?]
1212Coconut: [Oh, I get it now! Thank you so much [tears emoji]]
Nathan: [See, you got it. Who said your comprehension wasn’t strong enough?]
1212Coconut: [My mom said that when she was angry……]
Nathan: [She was wrong.]
.
1212Coconut: [Today is my birthday. This might sound a little forward, but could I ask you to… wish me a happy birthday?]
Nathan: [Sure. Happy birthday—be happy every day [sun emoji]]
And then he sent her a photo of a blue sky.
Sunlight pouring down, clouds drifting in the bright glow—they seemed to form an enormous smiling face.
.
1212Coconut: [We watched The Legend of 1900 in class today. Honestly I didn’t quite understand it [awkward emoji]]
Nathan: [Tell me about it?]
1212Coconut: [If you were 1900, having grown up your whole life on the ship, would you choose to go ashore?]
Nathan: [Would you?]
1212Coconut: [I asked you first! You have to answer first!]
Nathan: [Alright [laugh]]
Nathan: [I would.]
1212Coconut: [Aren’t you scared? A land you’ve never set foot on, everything unfamiliar. If it were me, I might not even know which way to go.]
Nathan: [If you can’t find the road, make one yourself.]
Nathan: [Being afraid of the unknown is human nature. But for me, living a life on a ship where you can already see the end from the beginning would be even harder to bear.]
1212Coconut: [That’s true—I don’t want a life that never changes either.]
1212Coconut: [Can I come ashore with you then?]
Nathan, unhurried: [Sure—welcome to the land exploration squad [handshake emoji]]
.
Nathan: [I might not be online much the next few days. If you have questions, just leave a message.]
1212Coconut: [Are you in a bad mood?]
Nathan: [Not exactly—but things at home are a bit… complicated.]
1212Coconut: [[image]]
1212Coconut: [Sharing something I ate today—the most perfectly round potato salad I’ve ever seen. Like a perfect sphere! I hope it makes you feel a little better~[cat bouncing gif]]
.
1212Coconut: [I’m using a telescope I bought online to look at the sky!]
1212Coconut: [I’m so curious—why do stars glow?]
Nathan: [Because of nuclear fusion, or because the surface reflects light from a star.]
1212Coconut: [Then why do some stars in the universe seem to shine so much brighter? Is it because their ability to glow or reflect is stronger? Do you think they know they look beautiful? [cute emoji][chin-in-hand emoji]]
Nathan: [Yes—because they have their own light, they’re not afraid of the dark. The darker the sky, the brighter the stars shine in return.]
Then, drawing out his words: [As for the second question—not necessarily.]
1212Coconut: [Huh?]
Nathan: [Same as how some people don’t know they’re very smart.]
.
1212Coconut: [I’ve been confused for a long time. I don’t know what I want to do in the future, or what kind of person I can become. The world seems so big. Sometimes I feel like I’m so small—like a speck of dust.]
Nathan: [The world is indeed vast—but I’m sure you also wouldn’t want to live in a cramped, tiny world. Am I right?]
1212Coconut: [That’s true.]
Nathan: [Where you’re headed, what kind of person you’ll become—these are long questions. You don’t have to rush to an answer. You can even keep changing your mind, and that’s fine.]
Nathan: [Whether you’ve found the answer or not—Coconut, you can always begin by just being yourself.]
“Be yourself.”
Perhaps the best answer he could have given a seventeen-year-old.
Even in facing other difficulties and obstacles ahead, these words would be able to give her steady, lasting strength.
In truth, Ning Sui had never really imagined she could be in a relationship that was emotionally stable, lasting, and genuinely comfortable.
And yet here she was—as though in a dream—and being with him, every moment was sweet yet passed in a flash. It felt like boarding some particular train through the world, hurtling forward through burning, brilliant dawn.
In mid-March, with the sky still carrying a slight chill, Ning Sui crept out of bed, wrapped herself in a coat and scarf, and slipped quietly onto the balcony, calling Xie Yichen.
All around her was extremely still. Her heart was beating very fast; her eyes were still wet at the corners. She rested her elbows on the railing and buried her nose in the loops of her scarf, barely holding her emotions together.
Xie Yichen was very busy over there—his schedule packed solid—sometimes not even having time for a proper meal, making do with a sandwich. The first time Ning Sui had called without checking his schedule first, she felt like she’d been impossibly selfish.
It took quite a while before he answered. Surprisingly, there was no background noise—it sounded like he was walking somewhere. His voice was warm and low, settling against her ear: “Xiao Ye. How come you’re awake? Calling me at this hour?”
Ning Sui had intended to keep her voice steady, but the moment she heard him she choked up: “Yeah.”
Xie Yichen immediately caught that something was wrong: “What happened? Is something going on?”
She blinked hard, couldn’t hold it back—her voice came out slightly muffled: “Yeah, something big.”
His voice tensed: “What is it?”
Ning Sui pressed her lips together, and said quietly: “……I miss you.”
There was a sudden sense that he on the other end was also suppressing his breathing—low, slow, his voice a little hoarse, as though something were barely contained: “You miss me?”
“Yeah.”
“I miss you too.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you in the dorm?”
“Yeah.”
Xie Yichen’s voice curved upward at the end: “Now you can only say yeah?”
Ning Sui broke through her tears with a laugh, and nodded seriously: “Yeah.”
He said quickly: “Kiss me.”
Normally Ning Sui would never have actually leaned in and done it—but this time, her ears warmed, and she still pressed her lips to the phone, softly kissing him across the distance.
Xie Yichen gave another low laugh on the other end, a long exhale: “So obedient today?”
“……,” Ning Sui’s heart gave an undignified, rapid leap. His teasing had eased her sadness considerably. She puffed her cheeks and said, “Don’t you have class?”
He was still smiling: “No class today.”
Ning Sui: “Oh.”
“Want to see me?” Xie Yichen suddenly lowered his voice. “Want me to get on a plane and come see you?”
Of course she did.
Ning Sui’s fingertips quietly clenched, and she swallowed: “……Don’t joke around.”
“Why is that a joke?”
His tone was still not entirely serious: “Why don’t you make a wish? Maybe you’ll open your eyes and I’ll already be back?”
“……”
She didn’t know how to express the warm, desperate longing in her chest. She really did want him to just come back, never mind everything else—but she couldn’t say it out loud.
——It was over ten hours away. And the jet lag would be miserable.
Ning Sui was still biting her lip, wavering—when she heard him say from the other end: “Is it cold, standing on the balcony? Are you dressed warmly enough?”
Ning Sui had just been about to ask where he was walking, why there was so much wind—and then it hit her all at once.
How did he know she was on the balcony? She hadn’t said anything.
A thought burst through her mind like lightning, her thoughts going entirely blank for a beat: “You——”
Before she could finish, a low, husky laugh came from his end.
His breath fell against her ear like a wave, like a boot hitting solid ground: “——I’ve been standing under the streetlight for a while now. Silly girl—look down.”
In that moment it was as though all the sound in the world dropped away—one single blank instant—and then her heart came crashing back to life, thundering in her chest.
Early spring. The night air faintly cool. Ning Sui, wrapped in her soft looped scarf, leaned over the railing and looked down.
Standing there was a figure—exceptionally tall and straight.
“Xie Yichen, are you insane……” She could barely get the words out.
“Is that any way to talk about your boyfriend?” The young man’s tone was careless and breezy, but his eyes were ink-black and full of light. He stood there, phone raised, staring up at her without blinking—his gaze bold, burning, unashamed. “——Yeah. I’m insane.”