In the letter, Helen explained everything, that I had misunderstood her, that I should have felt guilty for my misunderstanding of her, that she was not a renegade, that she had confessed that she had a good opinion of me, but that all the feelings that I thought I should have had after reading the letter did not appear. One of the biggest effects is that the letter is like a mild medicine, slowly smoothing my wounds.

I folded the letter and put it in my pocket, then put the book back in its place.

There is an end to everything, I said silently in my heart.

When I reappeared on the sixth floor of the studio in the evening, I didn't feel the same way I had last time, and I felt that everything was perfectly normal. The painting was still on the easel we had left untouched. As far as I can remember from the last time I left, no one had ever been to the studio. When I saw the portrait of Hai Linlin, my heart still fluctuated a little, but I quickly regained my composure.

I was wondering what to do with this portrait, and Helen had already stated in her letter that it did not belong to any of us.

I called Mr. Ou and told him that he could take the portrait, but he couldn't use it, and that he just had to come to the studio and pick it up. I waited for Mr. Ou in the studio for more than an hour, and when he took the painting, he still insisted on buying it. I didn't say yes to him, I was resolute and courageous, and Hai Linlin's words in the letter left me without the slightest room to back down. If I bought it, the painting would be essentially mine, and even though she wouldn't know anything, it made me even more determined to show the generosity of keeping my promises, and that I had to respect myself.

Mr. Ou finally took the painting for free, and when he put the painting in the box, he told him why I decided to give it to him, and I told him that the painting was too heavy for me to take home.

I interned for two months at a media company, working in the company during the day and spending more time in the library or lying on a bed in my dorm room at night. Boredom always makes time very long, and those two months felt like two years later, and I was working as an assistant to a designer in the company. The designer was my senior, seven years older than me, with a thick mustache, and his biggest hobby was drinking tea and grooming his beard every day at work. He rarely spoke, and he rarely assigned me work, and after a month on the job, he asked me to hand-draw a cartoon dog for a difficult customer, and he always disdained to do such boring things.

It took me 10 minutes to draw a difficult customer, an elderly man whose staggering steps made people want to go up and give them a hand. She looked at the cartoon dog I drew and scolded the designer, saying that it wasn't a dog at all, but a horse. This incident caused an uproar in the company, and almost everyone saw the sketch, and everyone thought it was indeed a dog. But the difficult customer persevered, and finally I lost all my humility and scolded the old lady. But at the request of my boss, I painted nearly 50 dogs for two more days, and finally she chose one, and finally paid a design fee of 5,000 yuan, from which I got a commission of 200 yuan. At that time, I finally understood what kind of logic Qian Minwei had when he said that he couldn't earn money from his part-time job.

After a quarrel with the old lady, I never received any work from the company until the two-month internship period was over, when I handed over the stamped internship certificate to the school. Then I went out and rented a house next to a river farther away, and took a newly bought copy of "Faust" with memorization of 1,000 lines in half a month.

When I got my diploma, I only stayed at school for one day, and all my things were packed after the internship, throwing away what should be thrown away, sending home what should be sent home, and taking away what should be taken away. Walking directly from the school gate to the office where the diploma was written on the notice, I passed by the back of Hai Linlin's dormitory building, and I saw a familiar figure going upstairs through the breathable screen window on the staircase wall, and that figure made my time seem to go back to the autumn of October last year, and I am sure that the familiar figure was Hai Linlin. I didn't dare to stay longer, I went to the office to get my graduation certificate at the fastest pace, and when I signed the signature book, I was surprised to find that the last person to receive the graduation certificate was Hai Linlin, and I was even more sure that the figure I saw through the screen window of the dormitory building just now was Hai Linlin. I signed her name underneath it, took my diploma and walked around the dormitory building, and though the idea of a surreptitious observation of her crossed my mind, I didn't act on it. I quickly escaped from school and rushed back to my rented house by the river, packed up all my belongings, and prepared to leave the city.

This was by no means a temporary idea, but something I had been planning in my mind for a long time, and I had the idea since I saw Helen's letter in the library, and it grew stronger and stronger until it became a reality that was about to become.

I spent more than two months thinking about which city I should go to, and one of the things I spent the most time during the day during the last month of my internship was to look up information about each city on the Internet, and I was looking for a city where a river runs through the city and there is no autumn or winter in the year. Out of all the target cities to choose from, I chose the city where Yingxiu is located.

The airfare to Yingxiu's city cost half of my salary from two months of internship, and I spent more than 200 yuan to buy a train ticket to think of my future life. The moment I boarded the train, I knew I wouldn't be back in the city for years, and college life would be a thing of the past, with only occasional pop-ups to adjust my emotions.

I sat for a full forty hours on that train, and I spent two nights on the train, one and a half days. I didn't sleep well the first night, sitting in my seat with my head drooping, often woken up by the strong vibrations of the train as it passed through the turnouts. A middle-aged man put his head and feet under the seats on either side, only his waist exposed in the aisle, and slept very sweetly, the snoring sound was comparable to the sound of the clanging train.

Of the forty hours, I slept less than eight hours combined, which was the longest train ride of my life. Looking out the window at the receding scenery, thinking about the city and school that is getting farther and farther away from me, it is as if I have gone to another dimensional world. I think that the city I lost is still the same, that school still has new students coming in and graduating, and no one cares that a man has exhausted all the love passion that youth has given him there.

I gave way to a middle-aged woman who bought a standing ticket for a child who boarded the train on the way, stood for four hours, and then sat in my seat all the time, feeling the time passing. Although I was exhausted from the long hours of sitting and the poor quality of sleep, I still enjoyed the feeling of peace and tranquility in the train, and I even wished it would be a train with no end in sight, so that I could have a real and useful excuse that the train hadn't arrived yet, and I wouldn't feel like I was fooling myself.

Because of the wonderful feeling of being on the train this time, I will use the train as my preferred mode of transportation in the future, whether I am traveling or traveling, and it is also my usual way to solve my daily worries and relax. Years later, the advent of high-speed rail has made this method more commonly used and the effect more obvious. I would even ask the company to exchange the ticket that arranged for my business trip to a high-speed rail ticket.

I arrived at my destination on the afternoon of the last Saturday in July, and when I got off the train, I was almost out of breath with a hot and humid air, and my T-shirt was already soaked just a little distance from the platform to the exit.