Some important laws regarding security were passed, and the protestors were captured one by one.
Bensimon wasn't the least bit worried it seemed. it was morbid to see someone so removed from the emotional feels that breaking the law and being arrested should entail.
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The fluorescent lights of the Thank You Store hummed a flat, white note, bleaching the colour from everything under them. It was a sound I’d come to know intimately, a soundtrack to my own life of quiet transactions and small survivals. I was examining a package of instant noodles, not out of hunger, but for the simple, mundane comfort of deciding between curry or satay flavour, when I saw him.
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Bensimon was in the next aisle, staring at a wall of energy drinks as if they held the answer to a question he hadn’t yet formulated. He looked thin, frayed at the edges, like a book that had been read too many times and not put away properly. His presence always sent a little jolt through me, a mixture of deep affection and a weary, protective ache.
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“The blue one gives you wings,” I said, my voice soft in the canned-air silence. “The red one just gives you heart palpitations.”
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He turned, and for a second, there was nothing in his eyes—just a vast, grey distance. Then he focused, and a ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Bauhinia. Maybe I need the palpitations. At least it would feel like something.”
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We paid for our things—my noodles, his single, red can—and stepped out into the humid Hong Kong evening. The neon signs of North Point blurred and ran in the damp air, a thousand competing messages of commerce and desire. We found a low wall to sit on, the concrete still warm from the day’s sun. The rhythmic clunk-clunk of the trams provided a steady, city-sized heartbeat.
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For a while, we just sat, listening to the city breathe. I could feel the tension radiating from him, a silent, screaming frequency only I seemed able to hear.
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“After all,” I began, my voice barely louder than the traffic, “you are only a human being. An average human being. You shouldn't take up the whole world by yourself. Do open up to us.”
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He took a long sip of his drink, wincing slightly at the sweetness. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” he said, the words seeming to cost him a great effort. “I just never know how. I never know how to love people as they need to be loved. It’s like I’m trying to play a song on an instrument I’ve never learned.”
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I knew this about him. It was the central tragedy of Bensimon. He felt everything so deeply it paralyzed him, leaving him incapable of the simple, daily acts of connection everyone else seemed to master without thought.
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He told me about his father then, a man I’d never met but whose presence loomed large in Bensimon’s life. “He taught me how to sort out the priorities of how to be a human being,” he said, his voice taking on a flat, recitative tone. “Surviving before living. Eating well and being safe was more important than anything else. A roof, a job, a full stomach. That was the syllabus for adulthood.”
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But I could hear the hollow echo in his words. “But you never believed it, did you?”
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He shook his head, a look of profound confusion crossing his face. “How could that be all? It felt like… like being taught the alphabet but never being given a book to read. He saw the world as a checklist of necessities. I always imagined it was more important to see the world, to feel it. That ‘life is elsewhere.’ I always had to be chasing that elsewhere.”
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I looked at him, at the profound disconnect between his soul and the world he was forced to inhabit. I thought I understood the root of it. “I think it stems from you trying to indulge one side of yourself at the expense of another,” I said gently. “You think it’s a noble rebellion, this chasing of ‘elsewhere.’ But I think it stems from you knowing yourself too poorly.”
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He looked at me, startled.
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“You don’t recognize that the things you despise are the very things that give you the foundation to chase that elsewhere,” I continued. “That normal people need to purchase things, to eat, to survive, to abide by the law. It’s not a cage, Bensimon. It’s the ground you stand on. You’ve always lived with so little love for yourself, that it’s impossible for you to grow up and realise that the life you despise—paying bills, respecting the law—isn’t the opposite of blossoming. It’s part of it. It’s the soil.”
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People who didn’t know him well would say Bensimon was self-centred. But they were wrong. He wasn’t trapped in admiration of himself; he was trapped in a prison of his own thoughts, dragged down by them, clogged up by the sheer weight of his own perception. He looked at the mundane requirements of life and saw not structure, but arbitrary oppression. He saw his own life and believed it had too little value to even bother with the fundamentals.
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“Promise me,” I said, turning to face him fully, my hand finding his on the warm concrete. “Promise me you will do a little bit of it, all the time. Just a little. Pay one bill on time. Eat one proper meal. Get yourself back together, piece by piece. You don’t have to conquer the world today. Just do one small, responsible thing.”
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He was silent for a long time, his hand limp in mine. Then, he stood up abruptly. “Come with me.”
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He led me away from the main road, down a narrow side street, past the grilles of shuttered shops, to the foot of a tiny, scrubby hill that rose behind the Thank You store. It wasn’t a proper mountain, just a green lung tucked between towering apartment blocks, a forgotten pocket of the natural world. He started climbing, his movements urgent, and I followed.
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At the top, the city spread out below us, a breathtaking carpet of light and noise. He turned his back on it, facing the dark trees. And then he screamed.
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It was a raw, guttural sound that tore from the very core of him. “I’M A HUMAN BEING!” he roared into the darkness. “I WAS BORN TO BE A HUMAN BEING! I SHOULDN’T BE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST FOR BEING ABNORMAL!”
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The words hung in the thick air, a desperate, painful confession. He sank to his knees, his shoulders shaking. I went and sat beside him, not touching him, just being there.
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After his breathing slowed, he spoke again, his voice hoarse. “Every time I look at the law, I cannot help but feel it is something completely arbitrary and not worth remembering. It’s like me looking lopsided in suits. They just don’t fit. The world feels like a suit that was tailored for someone else.”
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My heart broke for him. I understood then that his struggle wasn’t with responsibility itself, but with a world that felt like a cruel, ill-fitting costume. I lay down on the cool grass and looked up at the hazy, orange sky.
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“I just want to roll around and rub myself onto you like a puppy,” I said, the words coming out before I could stop them. It was a silly, childish thing to say, but it was the purest truth I had in me. I wanted to offer a comfort that was wordless, physical, uncomplicated. A love that asked for nothing in return, not even understanding.
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Bensimon’s gaze softened. The tension finally drained from his face. He lay down beside me and cuddled me, pulling me into his arms. He held me not with passion, but with a vast, aching tenderness. In that moment, on our tiny mountain, with the city roaring below, we were just two creatures seeking warmth.
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“It makes me so incredibly happy that you are still so kind to me,” he whispered into my hair, his voice thick with an emotion I couldn’t name. “You see all of this… the mess, the screaming… and you’re still here.”
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He held me tighter for a moment, and then his next words were like a cold draft. “But I understand you are a growing person. You must mature. You will find someone more suitable for you. Someone who doesn’t have to scream on a mountain to feel human.”
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There it was. His final, self-imposed exile. He was pushing me away not out of malice, but out of a twisted, heartbreaking form of love. He believed his chaos was a contagion and that my stability was a precious resource to be protected, even from himself.
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I didn’t argue. I just held him back. The night deepened around us, and we stayed there for a long time, two human beings clinging to a tiny patch of earth, trying to figure out how to love each other without breaking. The city lights twinkled below, a million lives being lived, a million struggles just like ours, each one unique, each one profoundly, beautifully, and painfully human.
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The week after that I hiked with Darcy. “I don’t know, currently, everyone’s had been occupied by the social incident.” I said, thinking about Bensimon.
Darcy commented calmly, “People don’t think about the social event anymore. We have already digested it. We are busy going back to work. Also, cute girls like you should be dreaming of having babies who grow up to play first violin in high school orchestra and then become doctors or investment bankers. Nothing futile or bloody like social events.”
His words felt like a blanket trying to smother a fire. It was the same mantra I heard everywhere: move on, get back to normal, focus on the practical, the profitable, the personal. Dream of violins and bankers, not of justice or change. It was a seductive idea, this retreat into private life. It promised safety, stability, a clear path. But it also felt like a betrayal of everyone, like Bensimon, who couldn’t just “digest” it and go back to work.
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We reached a lookout point, the view sprawling magnificently before us. Darcy leaned against the railing, his calm demeanor giving way to something more analytical, more cynical.
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“Revolutions are shiny and fun,” he said, his gaze fixed on the financial district’s towering skyscrapers, “but they are very expensive.”
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I stayed quiet, letting him unpack the thought.
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“They cost a lot of labour,” he continued, “and economic opportunities lost. All that energy, all those hours people spent on the streets, in meetings, making art, arguing online… that’s human capital. It’s time not spent working a job, not starting a business, not inventing something. The economy doesn’t stop for a revolution; it just bleeds out through a thousand cuts.”
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He shook his head, a dry, humourless laugh escaping him. “And it’s strange, you know? They want to capitalize on a revolution. Start a revolution economy. Sell the t-shirts, make the movies, publish the memoirs. Turn dissent into a marketable brand.”
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I thought of the trendy cafes in Sheung Wan that had once been meeting points, now selling overpriced coffee with vaguely rebellious slogans. I thought of the art galleries showcasing protest art, the buyers seeing aesthetics, not anguish.
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“But I bet,” Darcy said, his voice dropping, laced with a certainty that felt heavy and sad, “the money still doesn’t go into the right hands. It never does. The people who make the merch, the ones who owned the buildings that got damaged, the big corporations that eventually rebrand and absorb the movement’s imagery… they might see a profit. But for the people who kept inspired to participate? The ones who gave their time, their energy, their safety? For them, it’s just extra labour. Unpaid, unrecognized emotional and physical labour. They end up exhausted, traumatized, and poor, while someone else figures out how to sell their passion back to them.”
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His words painted a bleak picture. It was a calculus of exhaustion, where the cost of caring was simply too high, and the rewards were reaped by those who hadn’t truly cared at all. It was the ultimate dismissal: not only should we forget the “bloody” events, but we should also recognize that caring about them was, in the cold hard light of economic reality, a terrible investment.
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Standing there between the green mountain and the gleaming city, I felt torn. Darcy’s worldview was so practical, so survivable. It was the philosophy of someone who had to keep a small business afloat in impossible weather. But Bensimon’s scream echoed in my soul, a sound that refused to be digested, a cost that couldn't be calculated on a balance sheet. One man saw a revolution as an expensive disruption; the other lived a revolution inside his own mind every single day. And I was left in the middle, wondering if there was a place for a heart that couldn’t accept either answer.
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and then Add to home screen.