You held my hand and asked if I was ready to run to the other side of the road, I looked at you, before I could respond, then I felt my body dragging my legs in puddles. I tried to shake your hand off but failed, “I won’t let go honey,” you said playfully. I wanted to get mad at you for ruining my brand new shoes but you laughed. And I laughed. I guess that’s what you do to me.
Raindrops tapped on my face, I woke up to the heat of July in Hong Kong - there I was, at Repulse Bay, lying under the sun and the gray clouds, my body covered in sand after play fighting, letting nature take me places. I closed my eyes again to reminisce the picture in my head, my only memory of Japan, too vivid sometimes I’d think of it as a dream.
You asked me a while ago that when I looked at certain photos, if I would feel as if I was reliving the exact moment captured in frame. I told you I couldn’t. I couldn’t because pictures were only pictures - and I would like it to stay this way. But what if I did? What if I did feel something - would you still have let me go in the end?
Love was in the door two years ago and I thought it was a game of patience. And here I am now, lying on my bed, tossing and turning in the dark, with lights shining from the phone piercing through my eyes - which somehow has become a usual practice most nights when I am alone and restless - to go through pictures of us for hours, until I start falling asleep and so I stop weeping.
Funny enough, it doesn’t hurt me, the thought of you doesn’t sting. My eyes pour like the early Summer shower in Japan, my memories stand high up in solitude, at a distance where I can’t ever reach. Perhaps we have always been wrong about love. We think of love as something special, when it is standing on top of a three-storey building, flashing its neon lights calling for attention. And we think we can call it love because it brings colors to our lifeless Monday and it lights up the empty streets we walk on at dusk.
