Chalk dust danced slowly in the slanting, golden rays of the setting sun. It was an ordinary afternoon, and the teenage boy paused while erasing the blackboard, turning to look at the young woman behind the podium. She was in her twenties—gentle, yet separated from him by an unbridgeable gulf. “Teacher,” the boy’s voice carried a youthful, stubborn edge, laced with fragile hope. “If I had been born ten years earlier, and was ten centimeters taller… would things be different?” She looked at him quietly. A sad, weary smile touched her lips as she gently shook her head. With the quiet rationality and gentle distance of an adult, she gave him an answer that extinguished his hopes entirely. Carrying that quiet heartbreak and unrequited affection, the boy moved to a neighboring city with his family, not returning for many years. Time flowed on. He grew taller, shed his childish innocence, and eventually became a mature, steady man. He built a career, married, and welcomed a child into the world. It was only many years later, upon a brief return to his hometown with his family, that he learned the devastating truth. Just two years after he had left, the teacher—the woman who had always harbored a quiet sorrow behind her gentle smile—had passed away from severe depression. Her time had stopped forever in her twenties. The autumn wind rustled the fallen leaves in the quiet cemetery. He stood tall now, dressed in a tailored coat, holding the small hand of his toddler. He walked up to the modest headstone and gently laid down a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. From the faded photograph on the stone, she looked back at him—still young, still beautiful, her eyes just as they were on that afternoon so long ago. With red-rimmed eyes, the man knelt slowly, his rough fingers brushing a stray leaf from the cold stone. A bitter, yet forgiving smile touched his lips. “Look at me, Teacher,” he whispered, his voice low and tender, as if afraid to wake her from a deep sleep. “I am now two years older than you.”