© 2025 Kaela Svlverine. All Rights Reserved
The first time I met Tian Xiwei, she was standing on a bench, yelling at a vending machine.
“You took my money again, you useless plastic goblin!”
She kicked it—lightly, like it was a cat she was mad at but still loved—and then turned to me with the widest eyes like I just witnessed her deepest crime.
“I wasn’t yelling,” she said.
“You totally were.”
She pouted. “You heard nothing. I was… whispering. Intense whispering.”
And that’s how I fell in love. With the chaos. With the curls bouncing on her shoulder. With the pastel cardigan that had little strawberries on the sleeves.
I ran into her again—because fate is a clown with a sense of humor—at a flower market the next week. She was bargaining like her life depended on it.
“But this hydrangea looks sad, sir. You owe it emotional compensation in the form of a discount.”
The florist looked exhausted. I was enchanted.
“Still yelling at innocent objects?” I teased.
She turned around, face lighting up like fairy lights. “Oh! It’s you! The vending machine witness.”
“You mean victim. That thing’s still traumatized.”
She gasped dramatically, then grinned. “Wanna help me find the prettiest flower in this entire place? I need something that screams, ‘I’m adorable, but also dangerously capable.’ Like me.”
“Bold of you to assume you’re not the flower,” I muttered.
Her smile froze, just for a second. Then it returned—bigger, brighter, realer.
And she looped her arm through mine like we’d been doing this for years.
Dates with Tian Xiwei were never just dates.
A picnic became an impromptu musical (she sang with a mouth full of grapes). Movie nights turned into chaotic debates about which cartoon character we’d be in a love triangle with. Rainy afternoons? Full of baking disasters where she’d throw flour at me and call it “romantic combat.”
She once gave me a keychain shaped like a tiny fish.
“Why a fish?”
“Because you don’t smile enough. And I read somewhere fish are good luck. And I don’t know, it looked lonely on the shelf. Kind of like how you looked that day.”
“What day?”