How to read this

This is a year lived at full volume.

From June of 2021 to June of 2022, the two of you — Yu in Toronto, Feng in California — exchanged more than a hundred thousand messages: an average above eight thousand a month, all day and deep into the night, answered most often within twenty seconds of each other. By the simple measure of presence — of how much of yourselves you handed across the distance — these twelve months are the most crowded, most wide-awake stretch in the whole record of the two of you.

And the year does not climb toward its height. It opens on it. July 2021 is the most affectionate month in the entire archive, nearly one message in five carrying a word of love. June 2021 is the highest-volume month of all — 10,900 messages, a near-unbroken current of talk from morning to the small hours. Whatever else this year is, it begins at the summit.

Then it cools — slowly, unevenly, the way a long season turns. The autumn is the strangest weather in all of it: the most affectionate months and the most contentious months are the same months, tenderness and fury at full volume at once, with November the worst-tempered stretch anywhere in the record. Through the winter and the spring that follow, the warmth thins out message by message while the sharpness climbs — affection down about a fifth across the year, anger up by some eighty-six percent — and yet you never once answered each other any slower. The speed never broke. What changed was the temperature.

That is the whole shape of it: a summit, and a long, gradual turning-down from it. A season the two of you lived at its highest pitch and then, without ever quite noticing the day it happened, watched begin to set. The pages run to the morning of June 29, 2022, and they leave the two of you exactly there — still talking, still fast, the conversation nowhere near finished.

A word about the text. The quotes are in the language they were lived in — I have not translated them away, only glossed the key line in each, briefly, in italics, as a hand for the reader. And one mark needs explaining before you meet it: the character □ stands for a single character lost when this archive was saved, a smudge where the ink ran. Where you see it, something was typed that the file could not keep; most of the sentence survives around it. Read across the gap the way you both learned, that year, to read across the distance.

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