The Alley Was Always This Long – Chapter 33
by Little PandaConsultation
“Am I crazy?”
「The hardest moment after parting,
Is not finding that I miss you, but that I have become like you.」
Tao Tianran felt she was a very strange person.
This was evident in the fact that, since childhood, she could spend the better part of a day alone just watching snails.
Her mother was a real estate saleswoman, exceptionally beautiful. Her mother’s hometown was in Guangsheng. Tao Tianran remembered staying at her maternal grandmother’s house in Guangsheng for a period when she was little. That shrewd, slightly built old lady, who wore her hair in a low bun at the back of her head, would simmer a fig and black chicken soup, saying it cleared internal heat.
To be honest, she had never suffered any material lack, because her mother constantly sent money back.
When she was four, her mother brought her back to Gangdao, frowning at her as she said, “Why does your Cantonese have an accent? It’s so unrefined.”
But this wasn’t much of a problem, because little Tianran was exceptionally smart and possessed an outstanding talent for languages.
She and her mother lived in a large house with luxurious interior decor, but it was not in the affluent Banshan district; instead, it was hidden within a cramped area of old-style residential buildings.
To get to her house, one had to walk up a short slope. Beside the slope, a shop sold freshly baked egg tarts.
Every time she came home from kindergarten, the rich aroma of butter filled the air. Sometimes her mother would buy her one. It would be so flaky that before it even reached her mouth, the crust would crumble all over the ground.
Over the next two years, Tao Tianran learned dance, piano, and pure-accented British English.
Her mother would always say with pride, “My daughter is so pretty. She’s going to be a Miss Gangdao1 in the future.”
The angriest her mother ever got at her was when she ran out to play with the little girl from the family at the bottom of the slope who always hung diapers out to dry.
She remembered getting beaten that time. Her mother held a cane high in the air. “I racked my brains to get us to Gangdao—was it just so you could mix with people like this?”
Indeed, it wasn’t.
The year Tao Tianran turned six, she met that aloof, aristocratic man. His surname was “Tao,” and in that luxurious Banshan residential area, “Tao” was a surname known to everyone.
That was her father.
As she gradually grew up, she discovered that the once-glorious Miss Gangdao beauty pageant had long since declined. But her excellence ultimately became her mother’s bargaining chip to move into the Tao Family.
The year she turned eight, she moved into the Tao Family’s Banshan mansion with her mother, bidding farewell to the house on the slope.
Tao Tianran’s life had been divided into distinct blocks from a young age.
A block in Guangsheng. A block on the Gangdao slope. Another block in the Banshan mansion. Each block had sharply serrated edges, making them seem impossibly difficult to piece together into a complete picture.
Tao Tianran seemed to have come to a realization at a young age: life was nothing more than a series of disconnected experiences. Every experience would pass, leaving only her behind.
When she heard the news of Cheng Xiang’s death over her phone, a very familiar feeling flooded her heart.
How is it happening again?
This period of experience related to Cheng Xiang had finally been torn away, leaving sharply serrated edges behind; surprisingly, it too was about to pass.
Until today, when she went to the company. After socializing the night before, she had gone back to work overtime. The assistant had been grabbed by the Big Boss, so the first thing she did was go to the pantry to make herself a cup of coffee.
As she walked out carrying her mug, she spotted a beautiful face in the hallway.
Tao Tianran stared at that face for two seconds.
She had seen her once last night—Yu Yusheng. Before Tao Tianran went abroad, Yu Yusheng had only recently joined the company. By the time she returned, Yu Yusheng had been dispatched abroad for further study, so the two of them had never truly had the chance to work together.
She gave Yu Yusheng a slight nod and returned to her own office with her coffee.
She only felt that behind her, Yu Yusheng seemed to be watching her back for a long time.
Tao Tianran locked the door, sat down, set aside her coffee cup, and somewhat neurotically spun her right-hand pinky ring.
After work, she canceled her originally scheduled yoga class.
She sat in a corridor paved with elegant gray marble tiles. That serene gray seemed designed to stabilize a person’s emotions.
An assistant in a white uniform came out and called, “Miss Tao?”
Tao Tianran picked up her bag and walked in.
“Is this Miss Tao’s first time here?” the therapist asked politely. “Has anything happened recently?”
“No.” Tao Tianran paused. “A year ago, my ex-girlfriend passed away.”
“Did Miss Tao want to—”
“No,” Tao Tianran cut her off. She had not come to treat psychological trauma.
“Then?”
“I feel that there is someone who is very much like her.”
“Who is it?”
“My colleague. She just returned from Spain. Today is her first day back at the office.”
“Do they look alike?”
Tao Tianran shook her head. “Not at all.”
Tao Tianran only knew that Yu Yusheng was a famous beauty in the company; even after she traveled far to Spain for her studies, people constantly brought her up. To be honest, Tao Tianran hadn’t had a deep impression of her appearance. Seeing her again today, she found that she had classical heavy features, a sharp chin, and a pair of amber cat eyes with outer corners that slanted slightly upward. It made her look both charming and languid when she gazed at people.
But Cheng Xiang was different.
Everything about Cheng Xiang was slender—slender limbs, slender eyebrows—except for a pair of eyes that were astonishingly round. Her hair was also fine, but she had a pair of exceptionally dense eyelashes. Whenever she blinked, they fanned up a soft, fuzzy breeze.
It could be said that these two people’s appearances were not alike in the slightest.
She asked the therapist, “Am I crazy?”
“Why do you feel they are alike?”
Tao Tianran stood straight up. “I’m sorry. I want to cancel this session. I’ll still pay the fee.”
She hurried out of the therapy room.
The feeling this experience brought her was not good. If she had to sit in front of the therapist and seriously say something like, “Because I think the way they blink is very similar,” she really would think she was crazy.
Returning home, she opened her laptop and searched for relevant information herself.
She saw a joke: 「If you speak to the plants in your house, please do not doubt your mental state. Only when you feel that the plants in your house are speaking to you, please seek psychological counseling promptly.」
Tao Tianran muttered softly, “Not funny.”
She snapped her laptop shut, lay back on the sofa, and stared up at the completely empty ceiling.
Yu Yusheng was indeed a talented designer. Tao Tianran recognized this starting from the first time she heard her speak.
At that time, they were sitting in the conference room, discussing the design theme for this quarter.
The theme Yu Yusheng proposed was—「Regret」.
On the day the preliminary drafts were submitted, Tao Tianran felt she was being very strange.
She was clearly not someone who took the initiative to socialize, yet after the meeting ended, she stood in front of Yu Yusheng’s cubicle.
Yu Yusheng raised her face—a charming, cat-like face. When she wasn’t gently blinking her eyes, she bore no resemblance to Cheng Xiang at all.
But she blinked.
Tao Tianran heard her own voice ask, “Do you want to grab a cup of coffee together?”
Yu Yusheng looked at her for a long time.
Fluttering her eyelashes, she raised the pretty corners of her lips. “Sure, if Teacher Tao is treating.”
Tao Tianran withdrew her gaze from her eyelashes and walked toward the elevator alongside her.
She knew Yu Yusheng was watching her from behind.
She couldn’t say why, but she always knew.
With one hand tucked in her dress pants pocket, she held her phone in the other, scrolling to the very last chat box. She typed, her finger hovering over the send button. Absurdly, she wondered if she pressed send, would the phone of the person behind her ring in response.
In the end, she deleted that line of text character by character, her thumb lightly flicking against her right-hand pinky ring.
When the elevator stopped, she stepped out.
The person behind her grabbed her slender wrist. “Teacher Tao, we’re not there yet.”
Tao Tianran’s footsteps paused.
The woman’s hand was very soft. Only one person had ever been this close to her pulse before; that person’s hair had been very soft, her eyelashes very soft, her heart very soft.
Tao Tianran subconsciously pulled her hand back. Yu Yusheng had already withdrawn her hand and smiled at her.
When she smiled, she didn’t look like Cheng Xiang again.
When Cheng Xiang smiled, her eyelashes would tremble with a soft rustle.
Unlike Yu Yusheng, whose smile carried a careless, deep allure.
The two of them walked into the coffee shop together.
Tao Tianran asked, “What do you want to drink?”
“Affogato.”
Tao Tianran’s movement of scanning the code to pay froze.
“Could you drink something else?”
“No.” Yu Yusheng asked, “What’s wrong with an Affogato?”
Right, what was wrong with an Affogato?
Tao Tianran shook her head. “Nothing.”
What else could there be?
It was just that a person who would never appear in summer again had always drunk this kind of coffee—an ice cream scoop soaked in coffee liquid, a coffee that wasn’t quite a coffee.
After chatting with Yu Yusheng that day, Tao Tianran went alone to the cultural and creative block they used to visit.
She walked to the front of the Italian gelato shop, raised her face, and asked the owner, “Have you come out with a new flavor of ice cream?”
“What?” The owner laughed. “Not that fast, beautiful. Coming out with one a year is about right.”
“Oh.” Tao Tianran nodded. She didn’t buy any ice cream, instead sitting on the curb to the side.
One side of her long, straight black hair cascaded down her cheek; she tucked the other side behind her ear.
Some passing girls looked at her and whispered, “Wow, she looks like such a big shot! So tall, is she a model?”
“She’s too pretty. Dressed like such a corporate elite, just casually sitting on the roadside… What a contrast, hehe.”
“I wonder what she’s thinking about?”
What was Tao Tianran thinking about?
Only one thought repeatedly flashed through her mind: Every summer, only one new flavor of ice cream will come out.
She didn’t know if this counted as good news to Cheng Xiang, who had once loved eating ice cream so much.
Company dinners at Kunpu never had much rhyme or reason to them; the sole deciding factor was whenever the Big Boss, Yi Yu, felt bored.
As it neared time to get off work today, she started instigating, “Let’s go, let’s go, time for a team dinner. Hotpot, hotpot!”
Tao Tianran replied, “I don’t like hotpot.”
“Impossible,” Yi Yu said categorically. “There’s no one in this world who doesn’t like hotpot, just like there’s no one who doesn’t like having a birthday. Why don’t you like hotpot?”
“Because it’s a hassle. You end up covered in that smell.”
Yi Yu suddenly let out a laugh. “Not bad, Teacher Tao. How many years have you been in Beicheng? I guess you’ve done as the Romans do. You can even use the erhua sound2 now.”
Tao Tianran sat quietly for half a minute.
Then she stood up. “I’m going out for some fresh air.”
Tao Tianran was not used to the smell of smoke, but today, she went to the rooftop.
There were female colleagues from other departments smoking there, chatting about habits they had recently formed: “Sigh, I order a portion of Qiaotou ribs every night. Look at my stomach, it’s already bulging out in a ring.”
「Habit」.
Tao Tianran lightly chewed over this word on the tip of her tongue.
The most hurtful thing about a habit was that it often launched a surprise counterattack.
It lay dormant inside your body, and just when you felt you had grown accustomed to someone’s 「absence」, it would always jump out and catch you off guard.
Cheng Xiang didn’t like hotpot. But she was a kid who grew up in the hutongs; she loved sheep spine hotpot.
She would always drag Tao Tianran out to eat it, telling her, “Really, believe me, it’s not spicy. Not spicy at all.”
Then she would sit across from the steaming copper pot, resting her left cheek on her hand and gazing at Tao Tianran with a smile.
Tao Tianran asked, “What is it?”
“Nothing at all,” Cheng Xiang laughed. “Do you know why sheep spine hotpot is called sheep scorpion? You definitely don’t know, right?”
Tao Tianran muttered softly, “Silly girl.”
Cheng Xiang would just poke at the pickled cabbage in her small porcelain dish with the tips of her chopsticks, giggling.
She had never told Tao Tianran.
She liked bringing Tao Tianran out to eat sheep spine hotpot because she liked watching the way Tao Tianran looked sitting amidst the swirling steam and worldly atmosphere.
The copper pot bubbled away. The rising steam caught a bit on the tips of Tao Tianran’s eyebrows, caught a bit on the outer corners of her eyes, caught a bit on the cold, white tip of her nose.
Cheng Xiang asked Tao Tianran, “You don’t like sheep spine hotpot? Do you think it’s spicy?”
“It’s not spicy,” Tao Tianran said. “It’s just a bit of a hassle.”
“How is it a hassle?”
“You end up covered in that smell.”
Cheng Xiang would wrinkle the tip of her nose and start laughing again. Tao Tianran really didn’t know why she loved to laugh so much. Were there really that many things to be happy about in the world?
“How are you so funny, Tao Tianran?” Cheng Xiang touched Tao Tianran’s hand resting on the table, only to have Tao Tianran flip her hand and hook their fingers together. “Aren’t you tired of speaking so stiffly? We never say ‘wei-dao.’ We all say ‘weir.’ Come on, say it with me—weir!”
Tao Tianran wouldn’t say it with her.
She started giggling again.
A long time later, whenever Tao Tianran naturally spoke that word—weir—even she would be momentarily dazed.
When had she started catching Cheng Xiang’s linguistic habits? She hadn’t noticed at all.
They still had the team dinner that night, going to eat hotpot as Yi Yu wished.
Because a client had reached out at the last minute, Tao Tianran arrived a bit late.
The hotpot restaurant imitated traditional ancient architecture, carved with dragons and painted with phoenixes. She parked her car in the open-air parking lot outside and walked toward the entrance, carrying her bag.
A layer of warm mist coated the huge floor-to-ceiling windows, warm yellow light spilling through. The people from the company were sitting at the table by the window, and Yu Yusheng was right by the window. She was smiling, wearing a soft satin shirt that clung to her curves, her pale white wrist raised as she slid a plate of tofu into the soup base.
Tao Tianran paused in her steps.
She realized she was used to looking at Yu Yusheng from a bit of a distance.
Up close, Yu Yusheng’s charming, classical heavy features were too striking. She had to pull back a certain distance, until her facial features blurred, for the expressions on her face to vividly stand out—when she smiled, her nose would wrinkle.
Like an old friend.
Tao Tianran withdrew her gaze, took her bag, and walked in.
Yi Yu immediately raised a hand. “You’re finally here. I thought you skipped out.”
Tao Tianran lowered her eyes and glanced over. Two split hotpots were boiling on a large round table. There weren’t that many people in Kunpu’s design department. At this moment, two seats were empty: one next to Yi Yu, and one next to Yu Yusheng.
The hotpot restaurant used those retro long wooden benches. Tao Tianran placed her bag to the side, lifted a long, slender leg, and stepped in.
On the other side of the bench, Yu Yusheng’s eyelashes clearly gave a light flutter. But she didn’t raise her eyes to look at Tao Tianran. She continued looking at the colleague across from her as she finished the joke she was telling: “Only when you feel that the plants in your house are starting to speak to you do you need to pay attention…”
Tao Tianran sat down next to her.
She wore perfume—a very deep, alluring woody note that pierced through the scent of the hotpot’s red oil. It was entirely unlike the warm scent of laundry detergent on Cheng Xiang’s body.
But Tao Tianran glanced at her profile.
When viewed from the side, the aggressive impact of her heavy features lessened, allowing her expressions to stand out. When she smiled, when she blinked, her dense eyelashes would tremble and flutter.
In the past, Tao Tianran had only ever seen one person who habitually blinked like that.
Cheng Xiang.
“Teacher Tao, put in whatever you want to eat yourself,” the assistant called out to Tao Tianran.
“Mhm.” Tao Tianran picked up a plate of loofah and dumped it into the soup base to cook.
Yu Yusheng continuously acted as if she didn’t exist, only chatting with the colleague across the table.
Tao Tianran suddenly said, “Do you eat loofah?”
“What?” Yu Yusheng didn’t hear clearly.
Tao Tianran looked at her dense eyelashes, which were sinking into the swirling steam. “I’m asking, do you eat loofah?”
Tao Tianran’s right hand rested on her leg, her thumb repeatedly flicking the plain band on her pinky finger.
What are you doing?
Yu Yusheng paused for two seconds, then raised the outer corners of those amber cat eyes. “I do. Loofah is so delicious, why wouldn’t I eat it?”
Only then did Tao Tianran realize her shoulders had been tense the entire time. They now subtly slumped down.
She remembered what Cheng Xiang used to often say: “I don’t like eating loofah or eggplant. They’re all soft and mushy, not crisp and decisive at all. I’m a decisive person. Actually, I’m fundamentally a gong3, you know? Hehehe.”
The hotpot bubbled away. Tao Tianran reached out with her chopsticks to scoop out a piece of loofah, as if Cheng Xiang was laughing by her ear, hehehe.
Tao Tianran originally hadn’t planned on agreeing to Yi Yu’s invitation to a friend’s gathering.
She hadn’t expected to run into Chen Chuxia at the gathering again.
Chen Chuxia naturally came over to greet her. “Hi.”
Tao Tianran nodded.
The two of them bumped into each other in the smoking area outside the bar. Tao Tianran was not at all used to the smell of smoke; she didn’t smoke, and Cheng Xiang hadn’t smoked either. Her chest just felt unusually stifled, and she constantly felt she needed to get some fresh air.
Chen Chuxia asked, “You didn’t put on perfume today?”
“Hm?”
“The first time I saw you, I felt someone like you probably wouldn’t wear perfume,” Chen Chuxia said. “But the day I first met you, you were wearing perfume.”
“Mhm.” Tao Tianran nodded. “I don’t usually wear it.”
Chen Chuxia asked again, “Did you hear me on the phone just now?”
“No.”
Chen Chuxia waved her phone. “It was with my girlfriend.”
Oh, she had a girlfriend. Tao Tianran didn’t know if she should offer congratulations.
Chen Chuxia leaned against the cast-iron lamppost, her eyes curved into crescents, a cigarette clamped between her fingers. “It feels like I only dare to talk to you normally now. Back then, when I suddenly told you I had feelings for you, did it scare you?”
It wasn’t exactly that she was scared.
It was just that, for her, this kind of feeling seemed like it would never happen again.
Tao Tianran reached up to rub the base of the back of her neck. Perhaps she had been hunched over her desk working for too long during the day; it felt tight in continuous bursts.
Because Cheng Xiang had passed away?
This thought suddenly popped into Tao Tianran’s mind.
「Passed away」—she started to feel cold all over her body again. She simply could not allow herself to think about this.
She just felt cold, her chest stifled, and she could never eat liangpi again. Sometimes she even needed to put on perfume, because she doubted her own existence.
Did she exist?
It was as if she needed the scent on her own body to confirm it.
Chen Chuxia laughed. “You’re still so beautiful. Now I can finally say it: you were my crush that summer.”
Crush—a very classic English word used to describe a brief and feverish infatuation, like a summer.
Tao Tianran suddenly asked, “Excuse me, do you have any more cigarettes?”
“Eh?” Chen Chuxia was a bit surprised. “You want to smoke?”
She stood up straight, pulled out her cigarette case, and handed it to Tao Tianran.
Tao Tianran pulled one out and thanked her. She took the lighter Chen Chuxia handed over and lit it, choking and covering her lips to let out a low cough.
Chen Chuxia’s lips curled up. “You actually don’t know how?”
“Surprised?”
“A little bit.” Chen Chuxia smiled. “Because you look, well, very much like a big shot.”
A narrow face shape, facial features with a certain sharpness to them, and only two small moles adorning the edges of her thin eyelids, like an understated allure.
Chen Chuxia concluded, “You look exactly like the kind of person who smokes.”
Someone else had actually said that before, too.
Tao Tianran remembered evening self-study sessions during her third year of high school. Back then, the street lamps at school were just like this one nearby—excessively tall, making the light seem distant.
Tao Tianran had been called to the office by the teacher to discuss the English competition. As she walked back toward the academic building, she saw a person hiding by the base of a wall overgrown with dandelions.
Tao Tianran walked over.
Cheng Xiang was visibly startled.
“Waiting for me?” Tao Tianran asked.
“No-no-no-no, of course not.”
But even though Cheng Xiang’s grades were average, she clearly wasn’t the type to skip evening self-study. Yet here she was, holding a cigarette between her fingers and pinching a lighter in her other hand. The expression on her face was as panicked as if she had just destroyed the entire world.
Tao Tianran asked, “Do you know how?”
“Sure I do.” Cheng Xiang slightly straightened her back.
Tao Tianran glanced at her, reached out, and took the cigarette from between her fingers. Her cold, white skin brushed against Cheng Xiang’s fingers, and Cheng Xiang immediately pulled her hand back.
Tao Tianran said, “If you don’t know how, don’t try to learn.”
“Then do you know how? Smoking.” Cheng Xiang waved her hand, making a smoking gesture.
“Why do you think I would?”
“That’s how it always is in TV shows and novels. The top student with great grades and pale skin is actually hiding in a corner of the academic building secretly smoking.” Cheng Xiang grinned. “Besides, you’d probably look really good smoking.”
“I don’t know how,” Tao Tianran said.
“Good not to smoke. Good not to smoke. It’s good for your health.” Cheng Xiang nodded repeatedly. “But I don’t know how either. Actually, I secretly tried it with Qin Ziqiao before, but I just could never get the hang of it.”
Tao Tianran: ?
She asked, “So what if you don’t know how?”
“Then we don’t have a secret!” Cheng Xiang grinned again. “I originally wanted to hide here and secretly smoke a cigarette. Then you’d accidentally run into me, and I’d ask you to keep it a secret for me. That way, we’d have a shared secret, hehehe.”
She raised a hand and rubbed the tip of her small nose. “My life is too thin. My grades are so-so, my family is so-so. My parents are a bit nagging but pretty good overall. It’s like I don’t even have a single, slightly deeper secret.”
The cigarette she had just lit was clamped between Tao Tianran’s fingers. She didn’t smoke it; it just quietly burned away.
There was a faint smell of sparks in the air. The rolling paper sizzled, making one suspect that a firework would suddenly bloom in the summer night sky above.
Tao Tianran took a step closer.
Cheng Xiang instantly tensed her shoulders. “Wh-what are you doing?”
“I’ll tell you a secret.” Tao Tianran twirled the cigarette between her fingers. “I have a mole on my lower back. A red one.”
After saying this, she stepped back, crushed out the cigarette in her fingers, threw it into the trash can, and turned to walk away.
“Hey, Tao Tianran,” Cheng Xiang called out in a small voice behind her. “What kind of secret is that?”
Tao Tianran also didn’t know what kind of secret it was.
She had simply been wiping her body with a soft white bath towel after showering last night when she casually glanced into the steam-fogged bathroom mirror, and just happened to see it.
That year, they were seventeen. They wore Attached Seventh High School’s somewhat unfashionable dark blue uniforms. The only thing to be thankful for was that the summer uniform featured a skirt. When they walked past the corner of the wall, dandelion seeds would tickle against their calves, much like Cheng Xiang’s fuzzy eyelashes.
That year, they thought the future was very long. They thought vast stretches of life would unfold before them—together, or after they parted ways.
The English word “crush” had started to become popular that year. Everyone used it in a trendy way to define a brief, feverish infatuation, distinguishing it from genuine liking.
Cheng Xiang sat at the desk in front of Tao Tianran. She turned around and asked slowly, “Can I borrow your eraser?”
Tao Tianran handed it over.
She said slowly again, “And a pencil.”
Tao Tianran didn’t hand it over; she just looked at her like that.
“Hey, Tao Tianran.” She hesitantly rubbed her head. “Your English is really good, right? I want to ask you… does the feeling of a crush last for a long time?”
“No.” Tao Tianran shook her head. It was just a fleeting rush of hormones.
“That’s unscientific. This is unscientific.”
Tao Tianran: ?
“They say the feeling of a crush is like millions of butterflies dancing in your stomach.” Cheng Xiang grinned. “I don’t have butterflies dancing in my stomach. Who the hell knows what butterflies dancing in a stomach feels like… I just have a stomach ache.”
“I’ve had a stomach ache from the moment I saw you in sophomore year.” She looked earnestly at Tao Tianran, speaking in a small voice. “Even now, I still get a stomach ache looking at you. I think I’ll always get a stomach ache looking at you.”
“My stomach burns, moving up, up.” She reached out and gestured in front of her chest, gesturing all the way up to her throat. “Burning all the way up to here.”
“Flooding completely over my heart.” She pursed her lips into a small smile. “Do you understand, Tao Tianran?”
Tao Tianran hadn’t understood back then.
It wouldn’t be until a long, long time later, standing outside a bar, a cigarette she had asked someone else for clamped between her fingers, that Tao Tianran would raise her eyes and look up at that towering cast-iron lamppost—which looked incomparably similar to the one in their old high school campus.
Footnotes
- A 'Miss Gangdao' is a fictional counterpart to the real-world Miss Hong Kong pageant, a highly prestigious beauty contest that was historically a stepping stone to high society.
- A linguistic feature characteristic of the Beicheng (Běijīng) dialect where an 'r' sound is added to the end of syllables; known as rhotacization.
- In Chinese BL/GL (Boys' Love/Girls' Love) fandom terminology, the 'gong' (gōng) refers to the active/dominant partner, equivalent to a 'top.'
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