Chapter 1: Palpitations
Palpitations
Qing Tian, as usual, carried her schoolbag to school. After the morning self-study session ended, she took out the books she had just borrowed from the library and began to read.
The book was Li Bai’s 《Spring Night Banquet at the Peach Blossom Garden Preface》, which stated: “Heaven and earth are the inn of all things; time is the passerby of a hundred generations. And this fleeting life is like a dream, how much joy can there be?”
This reminded her of a Weibo post she had seen not long ago: a person’s life is short, like a mayfly, born in the morning and dying in the evening. Looking back in old age, it would be nothing more than a fleeting moment, a dream of yellow millet.
Whenever she saw this sentence, she would think of her background, a fact that made her feel inferior, a fact she had carried for so many years. She was sixteen years old this year, and the previous sixteen years had been spent growing up in silence and self-pity.
She was an orphan whose father was in prison and whose mother had died. She was currently staying at her uncle’s house. Her uncle’s family treated her very well, even treating her as their own daughter. But because of this, she felt even more sad. Whenever she saw her uncle’s family being happy and harmonious, her heart would silently remember her parents, thinking of her mother, her father, her grandparents, but they had all left her. Because she missed them so much, her heart felt even more bitter.
That feeling was like having one’s neck hung from a beam; if you lowered your head, it was hard to breathe, but if you raised your head, it was so painful it felt like suffocating.
Thinking of these things, her eyes gathered a lot of mist. She tried hard to suppress the tears that would fall at any moment. She cautiously scanned her surroundings. Fortunately, everyone was busy with their own things and didn’t notice her, the inconspicuous one. She casually wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and then composed herself to continue reading.
Qing Tian’s academic performance at First High School was top-notch. Because she usually disliked talking to others, she was considered a withdrawn and eccentric student by her classmates. Over time, everyone got used to treating her as if she were invisible.
She also got used to others treating her as if she were invisible. She felt that living in her own world was truly lonely, but time made her gradually accustomed to loneliness.
Sometimes, habit is a truly terrifying thing. It forces you to accept things silently, and it forces you to bow your head to reality.
Just as she was engrossed in her reading, a male classmate who was fooling around nearby accidentally knocked over her water cup. The warm water spilled all over the table, and the water drops spread onto the book, page after page. Qing Tian quickly pulled out the book and shook it vigorously to get rid of the water. She looked at the book, which had been perfectly fine moments ago, now wrinkled. She shook it helplessly, but no matter how much she shook it, she couldn’t smooth out the gloom in her heart.
The male classmate looked at her apologetically and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to!”
Qing Tian didn’t look at the perpetrator. Instead, she took out a tissue and carefully wiped the book, saying coldly, “It’s already happened, there’s no need for an apology.”
The male classmate seemed speechless by Qing Tian’s words. He had intended to apologize properly, but unfortunately, he encountered such an unromantic girl, so he awkwardly gave up.
Qing Tian felt a little suffocated, so she took the book and walked out of the classroom, sitting down under the shade of a small tree by the sports field. The September sun was intense, and a lot of fine sweat beaded on her forehead. From a distance, she could hear the shouts of students playing football on the football field. One figure was very familiar—the boy who made Qing Tian’s heart flutter, the school’s top student and campus heartthrob, Ji Xiangyu. She always watched him quietly from afar as he played football or basketball with his good friends.
He was like a star in the sky to her, to be admired from afar but not approached. He was like a diamond in a jewelry store, something to aspire to but not to pursue.
The two of them were like heaven and earth. She was a passerby A watching him in a crowd, while he was the king adored by thousands.
They were like two parallel lines that never intersect, moving forward on their respective tracks, and she was always chasing behind.
She would greedily watch his every move when he wasn’t looking, and then pretend to be indifferent when she returned to reality. In fact, with her looks and grades, she and he would absolutely be a talented man and beautiful woman. But she knew very well that even if they looked perfectly matched on the outside, reality was harsh. He was so out of her reach.
She shifted her gaze from Ji Xiangyu and looked up at the clear blue sky. Her thoughts drifted, her eyes unfocused, staring into the distance. Was there heaven there? Was there the paradise that people spoke of?
