Chapter 190: Gratitude
Perhaps everyone remembered a girl in a flowing white dress who had left a deep impression on them.
You might have spotted her through the morning mist on your daily bus ride to school. Or across from your university dormitory, beside the great banyan tree below the building where thermoses always stood in rows, you might have seen her bending her head to fill one with hot water. Or at some arts performance, you might have seen her dazzling presence on the noisy stage. Or on your daily subway commute to work, you might have seen her figure, always getting off two stops away. More likely, while hunched over your desk, frustrated by tedious, unskilled work that involved nothing more than entering customer information and monetary figures, you might have caught the pleasing sight of her walking away across the lobby, handbag in hand, wearing high heels that were perhaps newly bought and ill-fitting.
The beauty of stealing glances at a girl on the same bus, with all a boy's nervous excitement. The moment that lovely figure below the university dormitory bent down to push a cork into a steaming thermos. All of it remained sculpted in people's memories, three-dimensional, with sharply defined light and shadow.
Even years later, after growing up, establishing a career and a family, even having children old enough to run errands, bringing those memories out again might still stir a faint flutter.
But that was only imagination, because reality could be cruel, and reality could differ vastly from fantasy.
The girl you had stolen countless glances at on the bus eventually grew up looking different. Years later, the girl in white below the university dormitory was a young married woman with a family in tow. The girl with the lovely figure at