The flight from Shanghai to Taipei is as short as a high-speed rail trip, but the process of check-in, immigration, security checks, and the discomfort of flying makes it anything but light and breezy. After two consecutive days of flying back and forth, I was already weary of the experience.
The most frustrating part of flying is the waiting. You wait before boarding, you wait during the flight, and you wait to clear customs and collect your luggage afterward. What should have been a 90-minute journey stretches to twice that with all these procedures. A round trip eats up six hours. If I were to do this every two weeks, I’d fly twenty times in six months.
That’s seventy-two hours—just spent on planes, in airports, or commuting to and from airports. And this doesn’t account for unexpected delays, when flights are postponed and passengers are stranded at airports with nothing to do but wait. Long waits erode patience and force you to question the meaning of the time spent waiting.
The most precious gift one person can give another is time. Putting aside the three years Hao Yi and I had shared and the decades of life we might have ahead, could we really afford to give each other this gift over the next six months? Even if we endured half a year of loneliness and resisted the pull of fleeting emotions and temptations, would my love for Hao Yi still be as intact as it was before I met Chu Ke Huan?
I couldn’t be sure.
They say not to dwell on worst-case scenarios—those thoughts might manifest into reality. But, helplessly, as soon as I got off the plane, I started counting down the days until I’d see Hao Yi again. If not this weekend, then the next. Without time spent together, the days dragged on, and waiting inevitably led to questions about its purpose.
On the drive from the airport back to the city, I couldn’t untangle the meaning of this waiting. But another thought crystallized.
Things had come to this point—I couldn’t keep running away from Chu Ke Huan. I needed to see him, to face everything that had happened between us openly, and to clarify what we meant to each other. Only after defining that could I figure out what to do next.
“I’m back in Taipei,” I messaged Chu Ke Huan. “Are you free to meet tonight?”
“Probably not tonight,” he replied a few minutes later, his words a polite but unmistakable refusal.
It was the first time he had turned me down. It wasn’t anything monumental—if tonight didn’t work, another day would be fine. But what I couldn’t brush aside wasn’t the timing, it was the rejection itself. I kept rereading those few words, feeling like a passenger on an escalator, struck by the swinging backpack of a rushing traveler behind me—a sudden, careless blow.
It turned out that being rejected by someone you like still stung, still left a sour taste, still mattered.
Of course, I could’ve responded casually, saying, “No problem, let me know when you’re free,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do that with Chu Ke Huan. Especially not today. Ours wasn’t the kind of relationship where gentleness and patience could pave the way for a long-term future. Between us, there was only now. Concepts like “tomorrow” or “another day” were meaningless. He had once confessed to me recklessly, disregarding the potential fallout it could have on my life. I could afford to be just as reckless, playing the bad girl and stubbornly insisting on seeing him.
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