A Chance Encounter

This article was extracted from my early NetEase blog. NetEase Blog is no longer operating, but looking back, these words are still quite interesting, so I decided to move them over as intact as possible. This is mainly kept as a record; after all these years, the quality of the text, images, and links may all have been affected.

This article was originally published on June 7, 2009. I was about 20 years old at the time and was in college.

Today, by chance, I got back in touch with a classmate I had not contacted for nearly three years. It had been too long since we last contacted each other, and I could not say whether I felt happy or something else when I received her first text message.

I could not help thinking of scene after scene from the first year of high school. I met her in the first year of high school, and gradually stopped keeping in touch with her in the first year of high school too. In that muddled era, I cannot say why. It seems there was no why. Maybe it was simply because of the arts/science class division. Who knows? Even if I knew, I would not want to recall too much, because in my memory there is only happiness, no displeasure, and no pain! I always try my best to leave myself a string of optimistic footprints, thinking I am someone who is forever optimistic.

Life is really hard to figure out. Who knows which day two people who thought they would never intersect again will once more pass through the same place? I do not know whether this is good or bad, and no one knows. I chatted with her for an entire afternoon and learned that during this time she had gotten a boyfriend (I knew this before), and then for some unknown reason, without knowing who was right or wrong, the two of them started separating again…
She said that after going through these things, she had matured. I said that these past few years of mine had been plain and calm, with no big ups or downs, and almost no changes. She said her life now was very depressing. I said my life was very good…
Over the past three years, everyone's life has changed more or less, but it looks like we are all still as simple as before!

What does meeting again mean? When will the next gradual loss of contact happen? What will everyone's lives become in the future? No one knows. Maybe this is what makes life wonderful!

2009-06-07

Zhu Wenlong