A few days ago, I came across a short wedding clip of him in my social feed. He looks a little different now—slightly heavier, with his hair cut short—but when he smiles, he still has that same mischievous expression I remember so clearly. His bride is beautiful, holding his arm with a sweet, contented look, and the floor around them was scattered with pink flower petals.

Back in middle school, we used to imagine a wedding like that too. I told him my wedding dress had to be beautiful, and he said whatever I wanted, he would go along with it. We were children then, saying childish things, awkward and innocent and completely sincere. We took a few sticker-photo booth couple pictures, and those tiny printed photos felt like something permanent in our hands, as if holding them meant holding a promise. At that age, it was easy to believe the future would unfold exactly the way we pictured it.

Most of those photos I once wanted to carry with me every day are gone now. I only managed to keep one. I scanned it into my phone years ago, and it looks blurry now, faded around the edges, but every so often those young, unguarded smiles still stir up a little longing in me.

I never really imagined that one day I would miss him like this.

In that photo, we are wearing the same school uniform. He is grinning brightly, while I look dazed, caught completely off guard. He pressed the button before I was ready. I chased after him and told him we had to take it again, and he just laughed and said this one was good, that we should keep it. We took that photo three months after we started dating. We hid it from our parents and tucked it into the secret compartment of my schoolbag.

The way we got together was nothing like a drama series. There were no grand twists, no dramatic scenes. He was in the class next door, and we had only passed each other a few times in the hallway. Then, in the second year of middle school, a classmate handed me a love letter. It was from him.

I still remember the handwriting. It was a little ugly, uneven and slanted, and it said: “I’m Zhou Yikai from Class 8. I want to get to know you.”

That was the first time I knew his name. It was also the first love letter I had ever received. After a few exchanges of letters, I found myself in my first relationship.

Everything felt so simple then. A single “I like you,” one moment of holding hands, and your face would flush and your heart would race. When two people with pure, uncomplicated feelings were together, it really did seem like enough to make up an entire world.

After we graduated from middle school, his whole family emigrated. From that point on, our relationship slowly began to drift.

I still remember the summer before he left. Every day I made up excuses to slip out of the house, just so I could spend a little more time with him. The thought that I might only see him once a year after that made me unbearably sad. I tried so hard not to cry in front of him, but when he touched my head and told me to take good care of myself, the tears came anyway.

During his first year abroad, we stayed in touch often on QQ. He would leave me messages in the middle of the night saying he missed me. Maybe at first he was still struggling to adapt to a new place. Later, he made new friends and gradually got used to life there, and things became easier for him. In the eyes of adults, what we had was the kind of young relationship that was not supposed to happen. But at the time, what existed between us was real in the purest way—no conditions, no calculations, just affection.

Maybe we were simply too young. When you are that young, breaking up can happen just as easily as falling in love. Long-distance love makes people suspicious. Sometimes I would leave him a message and wait a long time for a reply. Whether he was genuinely busy or not, the delay alone was enough to make me angry for days, even weeks. I would keep wondering if he liked me anymore. Then one day, in the middle of an argument, I blurted out that we should break up. He agreed out of pride, refusing to back down. At the time, it felt as if the first person to ask the other to stay would be the one who lost.

Neither of us understood then that one moment of refusing to give in could mean losing each other for good.

It is the kind of love story people might call old-fashioned. Maybe even ordinary.

For me, though, it remains a regret.

Yes, we were very young. But the sincerity of that love was absolute, and in all the years since, I have never found that same feeling again. I do not know what became of him now, and it feels as though I no longer have the right to know.

I only hope that whatever I never managed to find again, he has it in his life now. Like that faded photo of us, where even after all this time, the brightness of his smile is still unmistakable.