Continue: My friend (Yuphen)

It is easy to put off things and then just never look back. By escaping my best and worst memory, I maintain a sense of invincibility, pretending that I never cared to begin with. Yesterday we had a practice session of our final presentation for my summer school. I was video-taped again, and my teammates watched it and talked about it. It was quite a relief afterwards, because I could put this one behind. But more important, I think this time I got it, the secret of a nice presentation. The trick? Treating it as if you are talking to a friend. So here I go again, to continue my story with Yuphen. Like talking to a friend, I can forget that I am actually closely watched by my own consciousness.

So our streak of bumping into each other continues. It might be a little exaggurated by a love-struck me, forcefully interpreting random chances into pre-determined destiny. We kept studying together, and more importantly, taking study breaks together. McDonald's is our favorite place late night, because you can get unlimited refills for coffee. What can be more attractive than freebies for poor students like us? I would stare at her for long, and she would stare back. Usually I won the staring competition, and then she would ask, "what are you thinking?" For some people, it is easy question. But for me, everything has to be filtered through my rationality, I had a hard time to explain. She was not happy in some occations when I dodged the question by talking nonsense.

Once we had a compitition on how many cups of coffees we can drink. I do not remember who won, but I believe that I drank 6 cups. Back in my dorm, I had a hard to fall asleep, twisting and turning for 2 hours before a dream carried me away.

It was still Febuary. Winter in Beijing was cold and snow fell. Yuphen injured her feet when slipped on the way to get hot water for her dorm. We head out to the McDonald's again. The snow was still melting. It was freezing. I held Yuphen's hand for the first time, pretending that was for the sake of her injured feet. She did not refuse, and I did not back out. One old lady had a random conversation with us when we crossed the road. My face probably reddened for no reasons, like a kid joyful because he stole a cookie jar without being noticed. Yuphen seemed to be highly spirited, talking and smiling and laughing when the old lady asked about her injured feet.

So here I was. Being rejected a month before, I worked myself into being accepted. I still do not understand what went through her mind because she probably knew my little tricks along. However, on the flip side, I guess that's just the way people meet and have relationships. You have to take risks. Stupid things (what else?) can add up to show how you care.

Anyway, we did not declared that we were in a relationship, but both of us just accepted. I liked her ponytail a lot. It was straight and smooth. My finger went through it, or my head touched it. It is like when you go to a nice hotel and hit the premium mattress and swear that you just want to glue there forever. I gave her cheap flowers, picked fresh from the random school gardens. It might be offensive to my rural dormmates to claim that I was poor then, but I believed I was. Spending my parents's money from their meager salary was just not my style. So I had little tricks to entertain Yuphen, but never to outlandish. I think she enjoyed it.

We had long walks at night around the campus or outside of the campus when the weather got warmer. I saw love-struck young couples passing by, and felt lucky that I was one of them. Always holding hands, and eventually we had our first kiss. One night I recited a poem to her, "When I got old...", freshly learned from a literature class I was auditing that time. This seemed to leave a strong impression on her. Several years later she reminded me this event before I could remember myself.

One day before her birthday, I got two bottle of birthday spray-string things from a store. As usually, we had a long walk to plan for the next day. It seemed that both of us had classes, so probably we wre going to be good students as usual. When we walk over the overpass of the main road, I took out the spray bottles, shouting "happy birthday" and spray all sorts of string on her. Of course, eventually I passed her one bottle so we could have a fight on the overpass. Afterwards (It might happen another day actually, but it seemed fit better here anyway), we lean against the fender of the overpass and stared the millions of cars passing under us. We had some discussion about something. I am pretty bad in remembering our conversations, because most of them are not important at all. They came up just so we could spend more time together. We decided to skips the class the next day. Instead we went to Heaven's Temple.

That's why I still believed that Heaven's Temple is the most beautiful place in Beijing. We arrived there in the early moring. Spring was coming, and greens were everywhere. It was still wet on the ground, recovering from the previous night's frost. We walked through the quiet alley between the trees. People were exercising TaiJi. It was nothing like the city I experienced on a daily basis. So peaceful and quiet.

It was a good time for maybe 2 or 3 months. We biked to difference places to take pictures for photography class. We even biked for an hour to watch "Titanic" with the free tickets from her parents. We also watched "Fall the the Legend" together in the library. I did not like it at all. I did discover one more thing. I did not enjoying watching movie with her. I guess I was a very private person. I would be completely absorbed and cry by touching dramas when I watched movie alone. But when with her, I felt very distracted, probably too aware of her presence and did not want to be judged. Years later, I watched "Fall the the Legend" again, and loved it so much that I purchased the video and soundtrack.

But good time did not last long, as things began to go downhills very soon and eventually fell apart.

(to be continued...)