Remembering student days, the two of us gathered every penny and shared a bowl of "hu tieu go", promising that when we got rich, we would plan long-term things together. Then one went to the South to start a business, and the other stayed in the old town. A few years later, when we met again, everyone was settled with their own families. No one broke their promise, it's just that youth passes faster than an appointment.
In those days, you rush into life like running in the rain. Staying up all night, passionately in love and then breaking up, missing this bus and waiting for another. You laugh and say rain is just a small matter, until the cold begins to permeate through each fold of your clothes. It is the cold from the apologies that choke up in your throat, from the hugs that were postponed with the words "for another occasion" and from home calls that were missed by the sentence "I'm busy".
And many others exhausted themselves to run for deadlines, telling themselves to try to finish this trip and then return to their hometown to visit. When they gathered enough money to buy a expensive massage chair for their mother, her mother's legs were already weak and she could no longer sit firmly. What did not wait for them was never their career, but the age of their loved ones.
When in the rain, everyone wants to grow up quickly. When passing by, you crave a leisurely afternoon riding an old bicycle together, crave the sound of mother calling home to eat rice, crave the innocent smiles of friends now each going their own way. If you turn back, surely no one will avoid that rain. You will go slower, look closely at your parents' faces, love deeper and be less confused about things that have not happened yet. But life has no round-trip ticket.
The beauty of the rain of youth is that even if it makes you sloppy, it still teaches you to grow up. The old scar does not make you ugly, it only shows that you have lived fully. Now sitting and watching the rain outside, you no longer regret it. The smell of soil rising after the rain is memory, a fragrance that never gets old, the further you go, the more people want to find it.
