It is now January 29, 2025, the first day of the Lunar New Year. Yesterday was the 29th day of the New Year (yes, there was no 30th), and once again, I did not watch the Spring Festival Gala, but I heard it wasn't good anyway. I’ll catch the replay when I have time. I’ve only just started writing the annual summary for 2024, and while I feel guilty, it’s also a helpless move, so I’ll have to put January’s matters in the next issue.
Let’s rewind to December of last year, wrapping things up amidst chaos (both in reality and in my heart). The annual meeting program was forced to perform a poetry recitation, and the lines were so awkward that my toes curled. I printed photos from the Double Twelve shopping festival and made a photo book of my travels with my partner. On New Year’s Eve, my partner sent a handwritten letter and various snacks, warming my eyes. Fortunately, the annual meeting ended successfully, and the exams were completed smoothly. Coupled with the anticipation of the upcoming holiday, December was finally endured. On January 1st, I also spent a day at Lake D, which can be considered a holiday experience card, briefly escaping the intense work and exhausting socializing.
Looking back at January 2024, it started in a rush. At the beginning of the month, I ended a five-day sweet time with my partner in Jinhua and plunged into the ALD project upon returning to Wuhan, with the office lights often accompanying me until late at night. On the 17th, I persuaded my mentor with the excuse of "the train ticket is booked" to head home early. On the 18th, I traveled to Chongqing and reunited with my old friend Miko at Jiefangbei, where the heat of the hot pot wrapped around the noise of the comic exhibition, as if time had flowed backward. On the 21st, I returned home, putting aside my thesis and graduation project for a few days to drink and chat with old friends from high school and visit my alma mater to see my teachers. At the banquet, I was pushed to be the "spokesperson," and after stammering for a while, I realized I still wasn't good at dealing with drinking culture, so I could only bury my head in my food and laugh bitterly to myself. At the end of the month, I learned I would be going to Yangjiang, but my thoughts had already flown to Guangzhou—my partner was there, and this trip was destined to be extraordinary.
February's theme was "heading towards." On the 4th, I arrived in Guangzhou, and the meeting with my partner felt like the beginning of a fairy tale. The "little waist" of Huacheng Square lit up the night, we stood side by side in front of the display cases at the Provincial Museum, and we left laughter at the artistic little shops in Dongshankou. The most unforgettable moment was encountering the pentagram puzzle in the library; the moment it was solved felt like finding treasure. The fireworks by the sea on New Year’s Eve were as beautiful as poetry, and the splashes from the jet ski soaked our clothes. On the 15th, I returned home, where my old friend LLX rambled on drunkenly until the moon set and the stars faded. However fresh the seafood in Yangjiang was, it could not compare to my partner's "See you tomorrow," which was truly heartwarming.
The spring in Wuhan was fleeting, with a few branches of early cherry blossoms quickly falling to the ground. March was a season of longing, with the thesis weighing heavily, making it hard to breathe. In midnight dreams, fragments of time spent with my partner in February kept surfacing: holding hands under the green shade, the stickiness of melting ice cream on our fingertips, the embarrassment of being kicked out of the children's area in the library... Group meetings, party meetings, and teaching assistant work filled my schedule, and the only solace was the weekend hot pot buffet, where the spicy oil boiled like life itself—scalding yet irresistible. One night, while reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude," the line "brilliance must be paid for with loneliness" struck a chord, and I thought, "If loneliness is the price, I am willing to buy it on credit first."
April began with the excitement of picking out a new phone and headphones for my partner. In the public service labor class, weeding and pruning became excuses to slack off, and in the afternoon, I huddled with classmates in Donghuayuan playing games, while the grasshoppers in the bushes were more serious than we were. At the end of the month, I escaped to the hot springs in Xianing at the Country Garden, where the little fish nibbling at the soles of my feet made me chuckle. After returning to school, the progress on my thesis crawled at a snail's pace, and the cafeteria meals cycled like a single song, with only the late-night voice calls with my partner being the daily surprise.
May was filled with the sounds of keyboard tapping and the bitterness of coffee. The thesis consumed all my waking moments, and the chair in the office was almost molded to my shape. One late night, feeling emo, my partner's voice came through the headphones: "How about we meet at Wangxian Valley?" On the 31st, after the defense ended, I rushed to the valley through the rain. Under the dim light of the homestay, the confession came 12 hours earlier than planned; my partner smiled but set our anniversary on June 1st. Strolling through the ancient village in the rain, we lost an umbrella and ended up drenched, yet found this clumsy romance to be extremely sweet.
June was a season of farewells. At the graduation ceremony, I tossed my cap, marking the end of my undergraduate years. The trip from Xi'an to Huashan intertwined the earthy smell of the Terracotta Warriors with the rust of the chains on Huashan, but on the way back, I quarreled with a friend and decided to throw the unpleasantness into the mist of Lishan. In the middle of the month, my partner came to Wuhan, and amidst the sound of the chime bells at the Provincial Museum, the guide passionately recounted the legend of Zeng Hou Yi. On the day I left school, the sound of my roommate's suitcase wheels faded away, leaving the empty dormitory with only half a bag of unfinished spicy strips; youth had hurriedly come to an end.
The keyword for July was "reunion." My partner came to Han for four days; during the day, I pretended to work, and in the evening, I rushed to see her. The watermelon we shared late at night was sweeter than honey, and I rode my bike to show her every corner of the campus, the wind lifting her skirt from the back seat. After my partner returned, the roar of the air conditioner in the new dormitory sounded like a lament, and the onboarding training PPT made me drowsy. At the end of the month, I had my wisdom teeth pulled; fortunately, my face didn't swell, but I had to eat plain porridge for several days—well, at least I could still laugh through the pain.
August was a failed attempt to turn things around. The pressure from the boss made everyone in the office feel uneasy; under the 40°C heat in Wuhan, the seat cushion of my electric scooter was hot enough to fry an egg. I gritted my teeth through the "intensive training" and finally escaped back home to become a graduate student at "Garryton University." The OpenFOAM tutorials made my head spin, and my hands trembled while writing C++ code, but on Qixi Festival, I received a mouse pad and wrist rest sent by my partner—suddenly, coding felt cute. At the end of the month, I was forced to return to work early, spending a fortune on a gym membership, fantasizing about developing an eight-pack, but ended up collapsing like a pile of mud after the first day of training.
September started with a blow. Two classmates in my group dropped out, leaving the office feeling a bit empty. On my birthday, I was so exhausted from moving dorms that at the boss's hot pot banquet, I could only bury my head and frantically dip the fatty beef. I stumbled upon a wild pear tree by Donghu Lake, took a bite of the sour fruit, and felt a connection with my ancient ancestors: "So the pears we eat now are limited editions from heaven." At the end of the month, I bought a small electric scooter and stocked up on 3C products, realizing with a wallet in agony: being a "graduate student" means being a student who studies how to survive.
October swayed between sweetness and bitterness. The owner of the rice noodle shop at Y Mom's gave us extra eggs, and I stuffed myself at the baking exhibition until I had to lean against the wall. I snagged a new Xiaomi phone on Double Eleven and paid attention to the U.S. elections at the end of the month. My birthday also fell in this month, but it seemed there was no special celebration, so the details have already blurred.
The wind in November was as cold as a blade. Wrapped in a blanket like a silkworm cocoon, the yellow braised chicken on the third floor of the B cafeteria became a lifesaver. The night before the group meeting report, I revised the PPT until dawn, and though the boss glared at me, I managed to get through. On the day of the first snow at the end of the month, while video chatting with my partner, she suddenly said, "You must keep warm in winter." I was stunned for a moment and added thermal underwear to my cart. My partner's birthday was in this month, and my handwritten letter was successfully delivered.
2024 felt like a calendar hurriedly flipped by the wind, with the corners curling up with the spiciness of hot pot, the saltiness of sea breeze, and the bitterness of code. The spring cherry blossoms fell to the ground before I could appreciate them, and during the summer night fireworks, I held onto unspoken sweet nothings. When the autumn rain soaked the windowsill, my thesis was stuck on the third chapter, and on the day the winter snow covered the earth, my partner's message was warmer than a heat pack. From Jinhua to Yangjiang, from Wangxian Valley to the peak of Huashan, the coordinates on the map formed a winding line, adorned with a lost umbrella, sour wild pears, and laughter from being kicked out of a bookstore. The keyboard shattered countless late nights, the defense draft was revised to the Nth version, and the gym membership gradually gathered dust, but there were always moments—days spent with my partner, the little fish at the hot springs in Xianing, the hot dry noodles at the baking exhibition—that shone like light spots in a dark room, reminding me that the film of life is still vivid. Research is like climbing a mountain in the fog, but love is the kite string under a clear sky; growth forces one to learn to swallow loneliness, but there will always be someone to share the same melting cotton candy with you. 2024 taught me: so-called completeness is not necessarily a smooth path filled with flowers, but rather having someone to share an umbrella in the rain, and daring to try again when lost. Thus, I feel that even if the future is filled with wind and rain, it can still be a romantic escape.