Lin Xiaoxi did not remember the exact day she first noticed Gu Xinghe. Memory, she would later learn, was selective. It preserved warmth and let the rest fade like sunlight behind clouds.
But she remembered the color pink.
She was four years old, sitting cross-legged on a pale green mat in her kindergarten classroom. Sunlight spilled through the tall windows, cutting the floor into long rectangles. Crayons were scattered everywhere—some sharpened to delicate points, some worn to tiny stubs.
Her favorite had always been pink. Pink meant strawberries. Pink meant ribbons in her hair. Pink meant something soft and safe.
That morning, her pink crayon broke in half.
She stared at it for a long time. She pressed the pieces together, hoping, as children do, that broken things could repair themselves if you looked at them hard enough.
A small shadow fell across her paper.
"You can use mine," said a soft, cautious voice.
Xiaoxi looked up. He was new. A boy with neat hair and serious eyes, standing as if afraid to disturb the sunlight falling on the floor. Gu Xinghe, she would later learn, was his name.
He rolled his pink crayon toward her. It bumped gently against her wrist, and that tiny impact traveled farther than it should have.
She accepted it with both hands. "Thank you."
He nodded once, quiet, and returned to coloring in red. There were no words beyond that. No promises. No confessions. Just a shared color.
The kindergarten measured closeness by simple, unspoken rules. Who sat beside whom. Who shared snacks. Who held hands in line for recess.
Xiaoxi and Xinghe began to orbit the same small spaces. They shared glue sticks. Compared stickers. Fell asleep during nap time with their blankets almost touching.
Once, on a cold afternoon, Xiaoxi's blanket slipped from her shoulders. Without waking, Xinghe nudged it back into place. She remembered the warmth of that small motion.
Children do not name their feelings. They only live inside them.
When kindergarten ended, it came with paper caps and oversized certificates.
They were told they would go to the same elementary school. That seemed sufficient. No one mentioned classes. No one explained that proximity is fragile.
On the first day of primary school, Xiaoxi searched for blue overalls in a sea of uniforms. She did not find them.
She sat alone at her assigned desk, tracing invisible circles on the wooden surface. For the first time, she felt absence without knowing why. It was not grief. Just… a hollow space where familiarity had been.
First grade felt large, loud, and uncertain. Xiaoxi noticed things differently now. The classroom smelled of new books and chalk dust. The playground was bigger. The friends she had grown used to were scattered among different classes.
Sometimes, Xinghe walked her home. Sometimes, she ran to catch up with him after school, her little sneakers thudding against the pavement. And sometimes, she did not see him at all, and her chest felt light and empty in a way she could not explain.
During recess, Zhou Yiming entered her orbit. He laughed easily, talked without hesitation, and once, when she lost her eraser, he tore his neatly in half and handed her one half.
"Now we both have one," he said proudly.
She kept it for weeks.
Xiaoxi began to notice something strange. She smiled when Xinghe helped her with math. She smiled when Yiming made her laugh. She smiled often, without reason, and sometimes without even knowing whom she smiled for.
One night, she wrote in her small diary, the lines wobbly and uneven:
If smiling counts as liking, then I might like too many people. Or maybe I just don't understand.
Second grade brought more awareness. She could now walk to school by herself, carrying her pink backpack, and she began noticing small details about people: how Xinghe's hands were always neat when he passed her papers, how Yiming's laugh could make the whole playground stop, and how sometimes, even in silence, she could feel someone watching her and feel safe.
She did not yet know what "liking" meant. She only knew that certain moments felt warmer, certain touches lingered, certain smiles made her stomach feel fuzzy in a way she could not name.
She began recording these in her diary in tiny snippets:
Saw Xinghe help someone else. My heart felt strange.
Yiming smiled at me in class. I felt light, but why?
Her mother noticed one evening.
"Do you like someone?" she asked gently.
Xiaoxi blinked. "I… I don't know."
Her mother smiled. "That's fine. You're very young."
Xiaoxi nodded. She still did not understand, but she began to notice that certain people had the power to make her chest feel heavier or lighter without touching her.
By the end of second grade, Xiaoxi's world had expanded. She carried her little journal everywhere. Every crayon, every laugh, every glance that lingered slightly too long, she recorded.
She learned that a shared crayon, a split eraser, or a hand offered during recess could hold more meaning than she knew.
Yet she did not rush to name it. She did not even want to.
She only wanted to watch, to feel, and to remember.
And she would remember these small, tender moments forever: the day her pink crayon broke, the day Gu Xinghe quietly offered his, and the quiet orbit of laughter and hands that formed around her without explanation.
It was the beginning.
It was the start of feeling something she could not name. Something that would stay with her, quietly, for years to come.