Hot Weather

The autumn of 2021 is the hardest weather in the archive to describe, because the instruments disagree with the feeling and they are both telling the truth. By every count, these months are simultaneously among the most affectionate of the year and the most contentious. September, October, and November all run high on love. They also run high on tension — and November 2021 is the single worst-tension month anywhere in the entire record, in any volume. The two poles did not take turns. They ran at the same time, often in the same hour.

It began gently enough. On the anniversary of September 11th, Feng told the long story of her first weeks at a finance job in 2001, the towers on the office televisions, the years of bad luck that followed — and Yu, instead of fixing it, simply received it:

[Feng]命运对我也不是那么好的

[Yu]你心底一直也是有愤恨的

[Yu]所以爱生气对吧

Fate hasn't been so kind to me either. — There's been a resentment in you all along. That's why you anger easily, isn't it. It is the rarest thing Yu does — he names the root of her anger without defending against it — and Feng lets him. The window closes with the two of you talking about hugging your children every morning so they will not grow up to regret it the way Feng regrets never hugging her mother, and then a goodnight, and then Yu's wistful note that all of it would be easier 要是在一起来一次, if only we could do it once, in person. That is September at its best: grief turned into care.

Later that same month, near Yu's birthday, the two of you stumbled into the autumn's signature move — a small grievance turned, by sheer accumulated tenderness, into a vow. Feng felt left out of his coded birthday post; he felt misread; it went round and round; and then it landed here:

[Yu]五十岁年华，回首漫长，坎坷

[Yu]但是我跟你在一起，却又感觉一切才刚刚开始

[Feng]我为你骄傲💋💋

[Yu]我爱你💕也为你骄傲。我感激你出现在我生命里，不嫌弃我的种种不好，不离不弃。

Fifty years old, and looking back it's been long and rough — but with you it feels like everything is only just beginning. — I'm proud of you. — I love you, and I'm proud of you too. I'm grateful you appeared in my life, that you don't mind all my faults, that you don't let go. 不离不弃, never leaving, never abandoning — the four characters that are practically a wedding vow in Chinese, said by two people who were married to other people. They meant it.

October ran hot in both directions at once. The month holds one of the most generous images Yu ever offered of how to hold a person without holding them prisoner — a thing he reached for after one of Feng's jealous spells:

[Yu]我们对对方的爱要像一座城市：用它的好，让里面的人自己不愿意离开，偶尔出城踏青也不是不喜欢城市而是享受人生本身。而不是靠修城墙和增加摄像头。

Our love for each other should be like a city: so good to live in that no one inside wants to leave, where going out into the countryside now and then isn't a rejection of the city but just the enjoyment of life itself — not a thing held by raising walls and adding cameras. Feng, who could match him line for line, answered with the joke that punctured and accepted it both at once:

[Feng]希望“偶尔出城踏青”不是🈯️偶尔出轨😛

[Feng]我爱你2❤️

I hope "going out to the countryside now and then" doesn't mean "an affair now and then." The pun is 出城 against 出轨. She laughs, and she means it, and she says I-love-you-too in the same breath. That is the metabolism of the autumn in three lines: a real fear, a real joke, a real vow, all stacked.

The ordinary days were sweet in a way that does not always survive into a record, and October kept a few. One night Yu simply narrated his day — the bookstore with his son, the sushi, the sake he'd bought — and the small report turned, the way it kept turning that month, into a creed:

[Yu]爱一个人就要告诉他或她

[Yu]比如，我爱你

[Yu]我要天天告诉你

[Feng]你这几天每天都说好几遍💋💋

[Feng]我爱你❤️

To love someone is to tell them so. For instance: I love you. I'm going to tell you every day. — You've said it several times a day lately. — I love you. He had spent fifty years, by his own account, not being told the world was gentle; the discipline of saying the words out loud, daily, on purpose, was something he was teaching himself and his children at once. That bottle of sake would surface again, years later, in Volume Two — Feng buying the same kind in a supermarket and remembering it — but it was bought here, in this October, on an ordinary good night.

But October also had the other thing — the fights that no city-metaphor could end, because they were not really about the two of you. They were about the small constellation of mutual friends — Yunfan, Fengzi, the others — and the screenshots, and who said what to whom. After one of them, exhausted, Yu offered the law that named the whole physics of the year:

[Yu]气量守恒定律

[Yu]在我和你之间生气的总量是守恒的，气只能轮着生，或者转换成另一个气。

The conservation of anger. Between you and me the total quantity of anger is conserved; it can only take turns, or convert into another anger. He meant it ruefully, but it is nearly a description of the data. The anger did not leave that autumn. It only moved around. And Feng, the same night, asking for so little:

[Feng]抱不到亲不到 连口头上的抚慰都这么难😢😢😢

[Yu]吵架和呵护是相反的两件事

[Yu]不能并存

[Yu]我们多呵护少吵架

Can't hold you, can't kiss you — even comfort in words is this hard. — Quarreling and tending are opposites; they can't coexist. Let's tend more and quarrel less. He was right that they were opposites. He was wrong, or at least the year proved him wrong, that they could not coexist. November was about to make them coexist for thirty days straight.

November 2021 is the worst-tension month in the archive, and it earned the title over a single grinding subject: the friends, the screenshots, the relaying of one person's words to another. Across the middle of the month the two of you fought it nearly every day. The longest of these is almost unbearable to read in full — Yu insisting, over and over, that Feng stop taking screenshots and stop relaying messages between people, Feng hearing in every repetition the accusation that it was all her fault:

[Feng]我好心 总是被当驴肝肺

[Feng]我再也不管了

My good intentions are always taken for a donkey's liver and lungs — the idiom for kindness mistaken for malice — I won't get involved anymore. And Yu, six days into the same misery:

[Yu]第六天了，我能坚持多久不崩溃

[Yu]我们别再说这个话题了好吗？

Six days now. How long can I hold out before I crack. Can we please stop talking about this? It did not stop. A few nights later it reached the place these fights always reached, the line that flew so often it stopped meaning anything and never once was meant:

[Feng]拉黑所有人吧

Just block everyone. And underneath all of it, Yu said the truest and saddest thing of the autumn, the wish that the whole year was secretly built on:

[Yu]基本上这三年是停滞不前的

[Yu]我希望时间能停止，让这三年等于不存在，我们重新来做

[Yu]我想跟你在一个隔绝的世界里

[Yu]没有任何干扰

Basically these three years have been stuck. I wish time could stop, that these three years could be made not to have happened, that we could start over. I want to be with you in a sealed-off world, with no interference at all. That was the dream — a world with no friends in it, no screenshots, no group chats, nothing but the two of you. It was unbuildable, and they both knew it, and they kept wishing it anyway.

And yet — this is the autumn, this is exactly the autumn — even inside the worst-tension month, the warmth was running at full strength. Late in November, after one of the friend-fights had finally burned down, the two of you talked about how to think about jealousy, and Feng arrived at the standard she actually held herself to:

[Feng]我是因为太在乎 是因为爱的太深

[Feng]我少疑问，要建立在对你完全信任的基础上。

[Feng]总之是两个人都要努力的事情

It's because I care too much, because I love too deeply. My doubting less has to be built on trusting you completely. In the end it's something both of us have to work at. That is November 2021: the worst fighting in the whole archive and, in the same thirty days, this. The instruments were right twice. The two of you were burning at both ends, and you were not yet tired.

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