"You open yours, and I'll open mine."
"I want to open yours."
"That works too."
Chen Shu had already picked up his own capsule, but at her words, he handed it to her.
Ning Qing already knew what he had written, but she opened it anyway. The note had not yellowed yet, though it bore the marks of time. She spread it out, glanced at it calmly, then rolled it up again.
In slightly free-flowing handwriting, the little note read: "I hope that twenty years from now, you're still at peace with yourself and have nothing to regret."
Meanwhile, Chen Shu opened hers.
Ning Qing's handwriting was beautiful, but a little too neat. It was neither graceful and lively nor delicate and charming, and it had no character of its own. Precise and perfect, it looked like a semi-cursive font printed by a machine. On it, too, was only a short message:
"I'm learning to be your sun, too."
It was not written to herself twenty years in the future, nor did it seem addressed to Chen Shu twenty years from then. It sounded more like something she had wanted to say to Chen Shu at the time.
For a moment, Chen Shu felt dazed.
He knew why Ning Qing had written that.
That was Caixue’s first year at school.
Most of their classmates came from different parts of the city, or even from other cities. Only a few had known one another beforehand. After they had spent a little time together, the female Class Monitor had probably just finished a young-adult romance novel and caught the bug, because she organized an anonymous letter exchange.
Everyone wrote one letter, with the recipient's name but no sender's. The Class Monitor collected them and handed them out.
As Chen Shu remembered it,