It was spring when I pushed that door open.
The studio lighting was nothing special — the long fluorescent tubes, cold white, not artistic at all. The two teachers leading us were both women, Ms. Zhou and Ms. Shi. They understood a great deal, and however thorny the problem, they never lost their temper.
I suppose that is what a good teacher looks like. Not volume, not authority, but really understanding what you are doing.
The days in the studio were simple. One desk, one computer, one glass of water, from morning until the dormitory doors closed at ten. There we learned Spring Boot autowiring, Vue reactivity, MySQL index tuning. Looking back, much of it is out of date; stacks turn over faster than pages. I am glad, though, that I learned it before the AI era arrived.
It was also there that I met her.
She had arrived before me. The first time we dealt with each other she was not especially polite, and I took her for a senior; only days later did I learn she was in class 2, same year and same major as me. She talked fast and walked fast.
After we had worked on the project for a while, we would go up to the roof to talk in the wind. The time up there had clear edges.
Later we got together.
And later, we separated.
I do not want to say much about why. Student relationships rarely lose to some dramatic conflict; they lose because both people are too young to know how to fold a relationship into lives that have not taken shape yet.
Code can be debugged; feelings sometimes cannot. Some bugs are the kind where you know exactly where the problem is and still do not know how to fix it — you fix one place and something else breaks, and in the end you can only roll back.
But I have never regretted it.
Because what I met in that studio was not only her, but the people who made me into who I am now.
Seasons came and went and the time went quickly. We simply got used to pushing that door open every day, pulling out a chair, sitting down and quietly finishing what was in front of us.
Even if fluorescent tubes are not artistic, even if some of that code will eventually be obsolete, that desk and that roof and the company held us, solidly, when we needed holding.
Later, staring at a screen late at night, I still think of that door.
Those memories have stayed lit in my head, like the strip light.
