I started being married on October 3, 2021. I stopped on June 22, 2026. Four years, eight months and nineteen days: it is the longest.
The file was lodged at the Xihu civil affairs bureau on Monday, May 18, nine days after my grandmother's birthday. Then comes the 冷静期, the cooling-off period: thirty days during which either of the two can take back a signature, and everything has to be started again from the beginning. He didn't take his back. You hand in the two red booklets and you are given another one, darker, with a photograph in which you are alone.
The agreement runs to eleven pages. He keeps house 17, the two cars and the four olive trees. I got a sum of money, and the painting. The painting is line 9, described this way: oil portrait, 120 by 90, unsigned. Yao Fei wrote the line. She asked me twice whether that really was the only thing I wanted named.
On the evening of May 9 he came home to house 17 at 7:20 p.m., an hour and forty minutes earlier than on his best days. He set his watch in the bowl in the entryway. He asked me whether I wanted him to sleep in the room next door. I said yes. He slept there forty-eight nights.