2023 — Crescendo

The autumn of 2023 is the summit of the volume, and the numbers make the paradox impossible to miss. The most contentious months of the entire reunion are October and November 2023. The most affectionate months of the entire reunion are August, September, October, November, and December 2023 — the same months. November carried 9.7% tension language and 13.7% affection language in the same 6,918 messages, answered in a median of nineteen seconds. Nothing was lukewarm. The love ran the fights and the fights fed the love.

The summit itself is a single morning, October 2, after a long night of laying every old wound bare — the years of blocking and unblocking, the doubt, the distance:

[Yu]现在就过去了💋

[Feng]希望是真正过去了❤️💋🙏

[Yu]我爱你💕

[Yu]只爱你一次，没有第二次，因为从未中断，也不会中断

[Feng]我爱你❤️

[Yu]爱了，就是永远的

[Yu]就算我们在尘世里不来往，我的爱也是不会中断的

I love you once — never a second time, because it never stopped and never will. To have loved is to love forever. Even if we never speak again in this world, my love will not break. Read that last line again, knowing how the volume ends. Yu wrote it at the peak, as a vow of permanence. It would turn out to be a prophecy of the form the ending took: not a stopping of the love, but a stopping of the speaking. He named it two years early.

The same season holds the clearest picture of how a single hour could carry both poles. On the morning of November 8 — the day of a long, pointless argument about, of all people, a celebrity neither of you knew — the thread opens in tenderness, Yu comforting Feng about her broken sleep:

[Yu]早安💋这次睡的怎么样呀？

[Yu]允许自己不生气💋

[Feng]这几次你做得好，我生气你不生气只是劝解我。谢谢你❤️

Within twenty minutes the same thread had reached 拉黑好了 — fine, block me — and 没有一点珍惜, you don't cherish this at all. And within the same hour it closed, again, in love:

[Yu]爱你💋我想跟你好好珍惜，不吵架，不frustrated

[Feng]不是你生气我就更生气💔

[Yu]💋💋

That was the metabolism of the peak: rupture and repair inside sixty minutes, several times a week, at full intensity. The 拉黑 threats flew both ways and neither of you ever meant them; they were punctuation, a way of saying look what this costs me. But the cost was becoming visible to you both. In the last days of October, Yu said the quiet part:

[Yu]过年几年，我们因为细枝末节的琐碎吵架无穷无尽，我对这个状态挺不耐烦

[Yu]吵了这么多，依然每天吵，我很失望

For years now we've quarrelled endlessly over trifles; I'm tired of this state. We've fought so much and still fight every day. I'm disappointed. And then — this is important — in the same breath the two of you reaffirmed the depth of the thing, and Yu proposed the exact strategy that would, in time, become the shape of the ending:

[Yu]不吵了，不争了，不讨论什么意见不同的事，让好的感觉慢慢积累

[Yu]不强扭，顺其自然

Stop fighting, stop arguing, stop discussing where we disagree, let the good feeling slowly accumulate. Don't force it; let it take its natural course. It was meant as a cure for the fighting. It worked. The fighting did stop — eventually, almost entirely. But it turned out that without the fighting, without the chasing and the demanding and the insistence on a follow-up, there was less holding the two of you together every day. The heat had been doing work. 顺其自然, let it take its course, was the right instruction and also, unknowingly, the first description of the fade.

But none of that was the foreground of autumn 2023. The foreground was love, more of it and more articulate than any other season of the volume. On Yu's birthday, Feng read a letter he'd written her:

[Feng]仔仔细细读了信，很开心、很感动、很幸福🥰。是的，一个拥抱一个吻 便化解了所有的恩恩怨怨。你的吻，最让我痴迷和想念💋💋

[Feng]我们在爱里不老，在爱里永生❤️❤️

One hug, one kiss, and all the grudges dissolve. We do not age in love; in love we live forever. On Mid-Autumn, the classical line for lovers under one moon — 千里共婵娟. At Thanksgiving, Feng's litany of gratitude 听我的废□不放弃的□句谢/对不起/我爱你 — hearing out my nonsense, never giving up on those words: thank you / sorry / I love you — where even the file's two small wounds, the □ where a character fell out, cannot stop the sentence from arriving. And in December, watching a film about dementia and a remembered first kiss, the whole reunion compressed to a single sentence each:

[Feng]我也永远不会忘记我们的first kiss

[Yu]人生最美好的并不需要太多，有这样的画面存在，就今生无憾了

Life's best does not require much; that such an image exists at all is enough to die without regret. That is the high-water mark of the volume — December 2023, the most affectionate month of the entire reunion, the fights briefly stilled, both of you fluent in the love and, for once, not bleeding from it. It is the place to stop if you want to remember the reunion at its best. The rest of the volume is the tide going back out.

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