Jiang Rong was leisurely enjoying coffee in the living room when she received a wooden box sent from Yunnan. Inside the paulownia box lay dried snow lotus flowers, and beneath the bouquet was a letter with a faint yellow tint: "Happy birthday, Rongrong. This year, I found this flower during the free clinic at Meili Snow Mountain, which can cure your old ailment of hand tremors. Huo Lan"

Morning light filtered through the old iron window, casting fragmented light spots on the medicinal herbs. Jiang Rong suddenly recalled the deep autumn of 1983, when Huo Lan rode into Wutong Alley on a 28-inch bicycle, with a roasted sweet potato wrapped in a notebook hanging from the handlebars. They always loved to break the sweet potato in half, watching the steam bloom into two white flowers in the cold night.

At that time, there were often delinquents loitering behind the Sixth Middle School. On a rainy day, Huo Lan sheltered Jiang Rong on the inside, and when her blue cloth umbrella was knocked away by an iron rod, the splashed mud left a crescent-shaped scar on her left cheek. "It's fine, just think of it as a new dimple." Huo Lan often said this later, unaware that Jiang Rong had secretly saved up breakfast money for three months to buy her scar cream.

The class group message notification interrupted her memories. Jiang Rong looked at Huo Lan's profile picture—her white coat name tag read "Chief Neurosurgeon"—and suddenly remembered how Huo Lan hurried over from afar during their reunion at last year's school anniversary. They sat on the rusted parallel bars in the playground, swinging their legs just like they did forty years ago.

"I heard your eldest grandson can run now?" Huo Lan took out an alcohol swab from her pocket and carefully wiped the mouth of the loquat syrup bottle she brought. Jiang Rong recalled how Huo Lan always managed to wear her school uniform as crisp as new, even tying her red scarf more neatly than others.

The snow lotus in the glass jar unfurled its petals, and Jiang Rong suddenly realized that today was also the seventh day of the third lunar month. She hurriedly searched through last year's calendar and saw Huo Lan's message on the page for the Double Ninth Festival: "Happy birthday, Rongrong. This year, I chased the aurora in Mohe and saw a comet that looked just like the one we saw in high school." It turned out that their respective solar and lunar birthdays, like entangled quantum particles, always reflected each other across the river of time.

The late spring wind swept in with willow catkins through the window. Jiang Rong remembered how Huo Lan jumped into her yard the night before the college entrance exam just to deliver half a piece of chocolate that was said to be invigorating; she recalled how on her wedding day, Huo Lan, as the bridesmaid, secretly tucked a warm pack under her wedding dress; she remembered the unwavering birthday text messages every year on the morning of her birthday. Some friendships are more resilient than love, like the old tree roots buried deep underground, where even if the branches above grow separately, the veins deep within are forever connected.

Jiang Rong opened the chat box, her fingertips hovered over the screen for a long time, and finally sent a yellowed photo. In the picture, two girls in overalls were drawing lotus flowers in front of a bulletin board, and the sunlight of 1984 dyed the tips of their hair golden. Five minutes later, her phone vibrated: "You owe me half a rubber eraser from back then; the interest must have turned into an entire stationery store by now." Following was an image of a CT scan—Huo Lan had drawn a simple lotus flower on the patient's brain scan.

As the evening glow dyed the snow lotus petals red, Jiang Rong suddenly understood that true friendship never needs to be deliberately maintained. Just like their birthdays growing in the new and old calendars, seemingly out of sync, but in reality sharing the same breath of the universe. Those missed moments transformed into annual rings, blooming into everlasting flowers in the instant of reunion.