The Turn

Winter is where the long season turns. You can almost watch the hinge move. The autumn had been hot in both directions; the winter begins to spend its heat unevenly, the anger keeping its volume while the affection starts, quietly, to thin. December 2021 carries the highest anger reading of the whole first half of the year. It is not louder than November overall — it is, if anything, a little calmer on average — but the warmth is no longer keeping pace, and you can feel the balance tipping for the first time.

The pivot of the whole winter is a single date: Christmas Eve, 2021. It is one of the longest, most exhausting fights in the archive, and the cruel thing about it is its shape. It begins with Feng simply wanting comfort — she had been hurt by something a friend said, around the time another friend's husband had died, and she brought it to Yu the way she always brought everything, looking to be received. What she got instead was Yu not remembering the original hurt, then defending the friend, then — the oldest wound — offering to go fix it:

[Feng]我要的是你安慰我

[Feng]不是要你做什么！

[Yu]她说话让你不高兴，我替她承担

[Yu]我冤不冤

What I want is for you to comfort me. Not for you to do anything! — Her words upset you, and I'm the one carrying it for her. Isn't that unjust to me. The whole misalignment of the relationship is in that exchange, on Christmas Eve, at its most painful: Feng asking only to be held, Yu hearing a task and resenting the task. And then, the accusation that would outlive the year and reappear, almost word for word, in Volume Two two and a half years later:

[Feng]因为你根本没有同情同理心啊！

Because you have no compassion, no empathy at all! She would say it again in 2024. She said it first here, on a Christmas Eve, in a car, typing while the people around her asked what she was doing.

The fight wound down the way they all did — Yu, late in it, turning toward tenderness without quite apologizing, reaching past the friends toward what he actually felt:

[Yu]我心里充满着对Bonnie的怀念和对你的心疼

[Yu]这几年总是因为这些人和事的琐碎让我感到扫兴感到难过

[Yu]我不是要责备你小心眼，我是希望劝你不要被这些琐碎打扰了自己

My heart is full of missing Bonnie and aching for you. These years, it's always these people and their trivialities that spoil things and make me sad. I'm not trying to call you petty — I just want to urge you not to let these small things disturb you. It is, in its way, the same wish as November's: a sealed world, just the two of you, none of the rest. But it arrived on Christmas Eve at the end of hours of fighting, and you can feel the cost of it now in a way you could not in the summer.

Winter was not all this. It also held some of the tenderest small moments of the cooling, and they are tender precisely because they are quiet — not the operatic two-a.m. heat of June, but something domestic and worn-in. A few days before Christmas, after a hard stretch:

[Feng]现在我觉得很安心，可以睡个好觉

[Yu]今天电话开头没有说宝贝

[Yu]现在要说两次

[Feng]宝贝 宝贝 我爱你❤️

[Yu]宝贝乖，宝贝我爱你

[Yu]宝贝睡觉觉💋❤️🤗🌹

I feel safe now, I can sleep well. — On the phone earlier I forgot to say "baby." So now I have to say it twice. — Baby, baby, I love you. — Good baby, I love you; sleep now, baby. The vocabulary has gone small and round and repeated, a private baby-talk, the language of two people soothing each other to sleep across a continent. This is the affection of the turn: lower in volume than the summer, but in some ways closer in.

By February the average temperature had dropped a little further. The month carries the lowest affection reading of the winter and one of the lowest tension readings too — not because things were warmer but because both of you were, in a sense, conserving. The reply times even lengthened slightly, the only stretch all year they did. It is the quietest month of the volume, and quiet, that year, was not the same as peace. It was the first hint of the thing that would define everything after: not fighting, exactly, but a banking of the fire. The turn was complete. From here the line runs downhill.

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