We met at a hot pot restaurant in Richmond — a meal that felt like such a luxury back then.
We talked for a long time, as if the years of distance between us had never existed.
I still remember that before he left, I took him to a local Chinese supermarket, and he carried home several large bags of groceries.

In my memory of that afternoon, the Vancouver sunlight was warm and gentle.
Standing against the light, I watched as he slowly disappeared into the entrance of the SkyTrain.
Along with his fading silhouette went the last trace of my very first heartbeat.

That was the last time I saw him.
Even though we had moved to the same city, at that point I didn’t have the strength to take care of much else.
I eventually returned to China and, little by little, let go of the other shore of my life.
Years later, at a reunion he couldn’t attend, a mutual friend casually mentioned that he had known I liked him back then — those hundred paper stars, filled with quiet feelings, had inevitably given me away.
After that gathering, on a whim, I sent him a long message, thanking him for never exposing the clumsy tenderness of my youth.
I don’t dare think too hard about what kind of fate once let our paths run so close on such a vast planet, or whether we might have missed something along the way.
Perhaps the truth is that we missed nothing at all — just like the wager we never spoke of again.

After that final exchange, we both grew into the adults we had hoped to become.

He went on to study physics in the U.K.; I studied film in New York.

We each built lives that are full and bright./pre>




And those hundred little stars will always shine quietly in some hidden corner of my heart.




💕