The lime sits untouched on my desk, its green skin dulled under the fluorescent classroom lights. Around me, voices drift in and out like waves…

“Did you hear about the new transfer student?” “I heard she’s from overseas…” “They say she never speaks…”

My mind wanders, floating through fragments of memory. That first day I saw her in the courtyard, standing alone beneath the ginkgo trees. Golden leaves spiraling down around her like autumn rain. The way she’d smile - just slightly - whenever our eyes met across the classroom.

“Hey, Ming!” Li Wei’s voice cuts through my reverie. “Are you going to eat that or just stare at it all day?”

The lime. Always the lime. She loved them, would eat them raw despite their tartness. “It’s like tasting pure sunshine,” she’d say, juice running down her chin as she laughed.

“It’s too bitter,” I mutter, pushing it away.

Memories blur like watercolors in the rain… Her sitting cross-legged under the basketball hoops during lunch, meticulously peeling a lime. The way she’d close her eyes with each bite, savoring the sharp citrus burst. How she taught me to appreciate the complex layers of flavor - “First comes the bite, then the sweetness hidden underneath.”

“You’re doing it again,” Li Wei sighs. “Spacing out like some lovesick poet.”

Am I? Perhaps. The classroom dissolves around me - faces and voices melting into a kaleidoscope of sensations. Sunshine through windows. Chalk dust dancing. The phantom scent of lime.

“She’s not coming back, you know,” Someone says. Or maybe I just imagine it.

Three months since she left. No goodbye, no explanation. Just an empty desk and the lingering ghost of her presence. Like a half-finished painting, edges blurring into white space.

“Want to grab bubble tea after class?” Li Wei asks, his voice gentler now. Understanding.

I should say yes. Should move forward. Should stop dwelling in these fractured memories that lead nowhere. But…

“Thanks, but I think I’ll stay here a while.”

The classroom empties as the final bell rings. I’m alone with the lime, watching shadows lengthen across my desk. Somewhere, in another city, another country perhaps, she’s living a different life. Meeting new people. Eating different fruits.

I pick up the lime, its weight familiar in my palm. The bitter perfume of citrus rises as my thumbnail breaks the skin.

First comes the bite, then the sweetness…

But I never take that first bite. Instead, I place it back on my desk, gather my things, and walk away. Some tastes are better left as memories.

Outside, the ginkgo trees are beginning to turn. Soon they’ll paint the courtyard gold again, like that autumn day when I first saw her. Life moves in cycles, they say. But some circles remain unfinished, trailing off into emptiness like an unfinished thought…