Xinyi was thirty-three and single when her parents reached the end of their patience. The pressure this time was hard to ignore, as if she owed them an explanation. She took stock of her own feelings and realized she was not absolutely set on staying single, so she let them arrange blind dates.
After several, one man stood out. His name was Hao, and by a strange coincidence he had been her classmate in primary school until he transferred away in fourth grade. The blind date felt less like a first meeting than a small class reunion.
The revived acquaintance moved smoothly. Both were old enough that marriage came up quickly. Then the practical problem surfaced: after university, Hao had stayed in Beijing, while Xinyi had a stable job in their hometown. If they married, one of them would have to leave the life already built.
For love, Xinyi decided to give up her well-paid job and move to Beijing after the wedding.
Everything was ready when life made a sharp turn. Her father was diagnosed with cancer and suddenly became bedridden. Before the diagnosis was confirmed, the doctor was not optimistic: if the tumor was malignant, the old man might have at most two years.
As an only child, Xinyi could not leave her father then. She decided to stay home and care for him first, then go to Beijing in two years. If her father turned out to be fine, she and Hao could be together within a year.
How should she tell her boyfriend? Xinyi found it difficult. It was something that needed his understanding, and saying it directly might seem too abrupt. After turning it over in her mind, she chose to send a text. She wrote a long message, deleted and revised it many times, until she thought it expressed her meaning fully without presuming too much on his behalf.
Then she waited. The wait felt endless, and she could not help growing anxious.
Two full days passed. No reply came.
On the third night, she saw Hao on QQ and they chatted a little. He did not bring up the matter, as if he knew nothing about it.
Over the following days, she still saw him online. They talked about various things. He never mentioned the text.
His silence left her with a problem: had he not received it, was there some other reason, or was not mentioning it itself an answer?
To find out what Hao thought, Xinyi went to Beijing. From the airport she took a taxi straight to his company. His office was on the twenty-third floor of an office building. Inside, blinds hung over the glass walls, and through the narrow gaps she could see everything in Hao's workspace.
She saw him sitting in the office and had an idea. She decided not to go to him first. Instead she took out her phone and sent the same message again.
Then Xinyi craned her neck and watched quietly. Hao, head down at his computer, felt the phone vibrate and instinctively turned toward it. He picked it up, glanced at the message, and sat there slightly dazed for a moment. His fingers hovered over the phone for a few seconds, hesitating. Then he gave up. He dropped the phone into a drawer and turned back to the computer.
In that instant, Xinyi knew there was no need to ask him face to face. She turned and left, less than ten meters from him.
She wandered the streets of Beijing for a long time. The loneliness of being a stranger in another city sharpened the pain of the breakup. She decided to buy a train ticket for that day and go home immediately.
Because she had left in a hurry, she had not brought much money. She bought a slow train ticket. From Beijing to Xi'an, that train would take twenty hours.
So Xinyi began one of the hardest journeys of her life. Sitting in a crowded hard-seat carriage filled with the smell of instant noodles, she was so hungry that she saw stars. Every food smell reminded her of the emptiness in her stomach.
When the train arrived, she got off and went to the noodle shop downstairs from her home. As the familiar smell drifted out, Xinyi suddenly let go.
She realized she did not love Hao that much after all. The pain of losing love could not even outweigh the happiness of seeing a bowl of noodles when she was hungry.
Later, her father's tumor was confirmed to be benign. She and Hao returned to being friends, occasionally meeting on QQ to talk about work and life.
She said she could understand his rejection at the time. After this experience, her family stopped pushing her to marry.
Xinyi kept her old job, still well paid. With her savings she bought two apartments. As for love, she neither refuses it nor deliberately pursues it.
A friend once described her as the most restrained and measured woman she had met when it came to relationships.
And when that story is told, a scene appears: a girl who has just been dumped and is utterly lost, traveling twenty hours on an empty stomach. Twenty hours may not be enough to bury her grievance and disappointment. But when intense hunger arrives as reality's messenger and stands before the wounded heart, she suddenly understands: perhaps she had not loved him so much either, or why would a bowl of noodles make her happy?
Life is often like that. Love makes people happy, but it is not the only happiness, just as it is not the only suffering.