You Have Everything I Dislike

Since freshman year, the two of us has had a very confusing relationship with each other. Now, I was about to graduate from school, and he was already going to work. 

Over the years, we have been in a long-distance relationship — always separated and rarely seeing each other. 

Fortunately, a variety of ways to communicate were developed through modern technology. You could video chat with the other person any hour of the day, even if you only wanted to show off your new haircut from all angles. 

It’s just that many times, especially when a fight has happened, a couple dozen phone calls and hundreds of text messages would never be as good as a real hug.

After the third master agreed to my “confession,” he immediately called me. At that time, I was taking a test in the classroom. 

Feeling the phone vibrate, I panicked for a moment. The change in the relationship made me a little uncomfortable.

Taking the phone, I ran to the teaching building lobby. While talking on the phone, I kept circling around the white pillar. 

It was early winter, and the hall doors were open; the wind blew in from time to time. I stomped my feet to keep warm, and my voice trembled as I spoke.

“Are you nervous?” Third Master asked.

“No, I’m just cold,” I said.

The third master then said, “Then, go back to the classroom.”

“Okay, I’ll go back,” I replied.

We did not even say goodbye before I was hit by the cold winds and rushed back to class. Only after I had sat down did I realize that this was the first ever phone call we had made since we had established our relationship. 

We didn’t even talk about anything meaningful!

That night, I called him after returning to the dormitory. He hung up before immediately calling me back. 

I’ve only ever gotten this kind of treatment from my mom. When he did it, I suddenly felt warm inside.

In front of my friends, I was a woman who could get hot water for the whole dormitory, carrying six hot water bottles up to the fifth floor by myself; but in the eyes of the third master, I was a little girl who would struggle to open even a bottle cap. 

Many of his considerate details make me feel that I did not need to pretend whenever I was with him.

The whole night, we talked for hours about our high school classmates, our college classmates, and each other’s new lives.

Our “phone love” had been going strong ever since.

Every day, before going to sleep, Third Master and I would lie on our respective beds and cook phone porridge for an hour or two, with the both of us never wanting the call to be over. 

Finally, one day, I suddenly felt that something was wrong – not only was I talking on the phone for so long, but even the Third Master was also talking a lot.

“Did you always talk this much all the time?” I asked him.

He told me a story. 

“When I was about six or seven years old, I was playing at my aunt’s house. I kept talking the whole time we were having dinner, so my cousin asked me, ‘Where do you get the energy to talk this much?’ I don’t know how I even came up with it, but I said, ‘I just have a broken mouth’.”

I could imagine a little third master sitting at a table with a bunch of adults, saying, “I just have a broken mouth.”

It’s kinda cute.

After this tale of bewilderment, my impression of that quiet and innocent teenager was gone from then on, eventually turning into an outwardly-pretending-to-be-deep person who would utter all sorts of silly phrases just to tease me.

   

One day, I was reading a book in my dorm room. The wind was so strong that the windows were blown back and forth. The sound of the wind whistling was audible.

The third master suddenly called me.

“I walked under a row of big trees a moment ago, the leaves were especially green, and the sun was shining so bright.”

“It’s very windy here in Beijing,” I said.

“The sun was shining on the leaves when I inexplicably thought of you.”

I did not understand what that had to do with anything, so I asked in confusion, “What?”

“It suddenly occurred to me just how much I like you,” he said.

I was dumbfounded. 

From the corner of my eye, I could see that the dead tree branches outside the window were about to be broken by the wind.

That was the first time he said out loud that he liked me.