Last night, a 19-year-old guy invited me over to his place at almost 10pm, making a point of mentioning his parents weren’t home. I happily accepted the invitation. In an instant, a whole vocabulary from some bygone era — “one-night stand,” “meeting someone from the internet,” “first love”… — came flooding back, and I felt like I’d been thrown back several years in time.

It’s hard to picture now, but I put on a PUMA long-sleeve tee I’d bought four years earlier, a pair of Nike sweatpants, and a pair of bright white sneakers, and went off to meet this internet friend like some high schooler. He was much better looking in person than in his photos — a straight nose, big eyes, fair skin. He wore a plaid shirt and black jeans, an outfit that in my eyes was the standard uniform of a boy. But I felt he was nowhere near nineteen.

He didn’t talk much — I couldn’t tell if it was because we didn’t know each other well, or just his personality. I fell quiet too, in turn.

Once we got to his bedroom, he seemed a little shy, burying himself in a game of Dota and leaving me to my own devices — a thoroughly typical boy thing to do, and one I understood completely. On his narrow bookshelf were crammed all sorts of books I had no interest in, from Cheng Junyi to Yu Dan, to the standard middle- and high-school textbooks and a pile of study guides. Of course, what dominated most of his room were Lego sets, large and small. I think he’d once told me he liked building blocks.

Time dragged on slowly until midnight, and we decided to sleep. Lying in bed, I realized this boy and I had nothing whatsoever in common to talk about — the songs he listened to I’d never heard of, the films he watched were exactly the kind I’d dismiss outright… Then suddenly, from the courtyard outside came the broken sound of a violin playing Hacken Lee’s “Tipsy in Half a Night,” and I stopped talking, and so did he. In the end we did nothing at all, and slept back to back.

It rained in the small hours, and in a daze I felt a hand trace along my back, slip past the edge of my underwear, and pause at the edge of a certain ridge. I’ll admit it — he really was good-looking, and if it had been some earlier version of me, I would absolutely have gone to bed with him. But now I really couldn’t go on, because I’m no longer a teenager, or maybe because I no longer enjoy that adolescent way of wanting things — more curiosity and desire than love. I turned over and told him to go to sleep. Gradually, the night rain stopped, the clouds parted, and before I knew it I’d drifted off.

In the morning, he walked out with me, trailing a faint scent of cologne. Just as I’d guessed, he really was a student at a nearby high school. When we reached the school gate, I watched him pull a school uniform out of his bag, put it on, and head inside.

I didn’t take the bus, choosing instead to walk slowly home. Since it had rained in the night, the ground felt freshly washed, and the air was unusually crisp. Seven years ago, when I first arrived in Chengdu, I hated this city’s permanent musty smell. And yet now I love these streets, this city. Sometimes it mischievously rains or blows a gale, and sometimes it’s gloriously, cheerfully clear. The feeling it gives me is always that strange mix of familiar and foreign, intimate all the same.

A few days ago, in a chat room, I got kicked out by the moderator for being over the age limit, and I was still sulking about it. Thinking about it now, I really have grown up, and there’s no going back — toward those beautiful boys in their plaid shirts, all I have left now is a feeling lower down in my body, nothing more. As for them, they’re like trains just setting off, still to race across plains, deserts, mountains, and canyons, with no shortage of places left to roam and gaze upon freely.

As I walked on, a wet phoenix-tree leaf fell onto my head. I’ve picked up something of this city’s scent too — and isn’t that, in its own way, rather lovely.