In those crowded dirty streets that led to nowhere, washed clean of dust by days of ravaging rain, the streets felt like an anonymous bed of refuge for the nameless. The spring breeze set the underwear hanging in the dusty hangers swaying. The sky was cloudless and frozen in a hue of blue. It almost was so perfect it was painful to look at the dark beauty of the city. A puff of wind swept across the myriad of buildings all standing next to each other like a labyrinth, and into the little compounds containing people like figurines. A puff of wind that reached Bensimon’s hair before it disappeared into the gaps between the bronze bars of the public housing unit and a cat meowed upstairs – a sound that seemed almost torturing in the stark silence.
We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We were like figurines placed in a solemn doll house. We played house, with our rice cookers and spoke about nothing. He was handling a roast duck, and cooking it inside a rice cooker. The light shone softly on the smooth service of the appliance, and he handled it like something he treasured. A soft limp body of the roast duck, the roast skin shining almost like an armour. I wonder if he washed his hands, but that is almost irrelevant, because the scene tugs onto my heartstrings. Listen, and maybe the vibrations will ring in your ears. But Bensimon was ever so silent, or being deliberately quiet. The background silence blended into nothingness, and the pain began to soften, like music you heard many times, and the critical point to touch your heart, slowly fade. You knew the touching point was coming, and it was there – just there, but you felt nothing. You missed all the touching points. It was painful to feel the tucking of the violin cords, but I prayed for the sound to disappear at the time. The pain is bound to disappear one day.
Do you love me? I tried to ask but the sound was lost somewhere.
“I love you.” Bensimon said, as if reading my mind, but he did not talk as if he was addressing his answer to me. More like a whisper to some phantom behind me. “Every wish of yours is my comment, I would always go onto mountains of knifes and down into a pot of oil to make our wishes come true.”
“Ah, that expression is so old fashioned.”
“But so true.”
“I just want you beside me.”
“Bensimon,” I began, my voice softer than the rain. I traced a finger through the condensation on the table, drawing a vague, looping shape—a heart, maybe, or just a nervous scribble. “you mentioned Pandora.” He nodded, his eyes on me, not on the ghost of his famously beautiful ex-girlfriend.I took a breath that felt like shattering glass. “Did you… did you really love her more?”
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I braced for the swift, romantic denial. The ‘Of course not, it’s always been you.’ But Bensimon was not a man of swift, easy answers. He considered words like precious stones, weighing them for their truest weight. He looked down into his coffee, then out at the street where the headlights of passing cars blurred into streaking gold lines in the wet dusk.
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“Love is the wrong word,” he said finally, and my heart did a nosedive straight into my stomach. Then he continued, his voice low and deliberate. “Or perhaps it’s the right word, but applied to the wrong feeling.”
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He looked at me, and his gaze was so direct it felt like a touch. “With Pandora, it was like admiring a masterpiece in a climate-controlled museum. It was perfect. Flawless. The lighting was always perfect. You could appreciate its beauty, its value, its technique. But you could never touch it. There was no urgency. It was… complete, without me.”
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I felt a strange, unexpected pang of sympathy for the mythically beautiful Pandora, reduced to a perfectly lit, untouchable exhibit.
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“But you,” he said, and his voice changed. It became rougher, softer, more urgent. “Bauhinia, with you, it’s never been admiration. It’s a sense of… painful realization.”
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“Painful?” I whispered, the word catching in my throat. My heart was a frantic bird against my ribs.
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“Yes,” he said, leaning forward, the table a small continent between us. “It’s the pain of seeing something so hopelessly, devastatingly beautiful precisely because it is not perfect. It’s the beauty of a cracked pavement with weeds pushing through it. It’s the beauty of a mended ceramic cup, the gold seam making its history visible. It’s the beauty of a life, an average life, being lived with such profound grace that it hurts to look at it directly.”
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He shook his head, as if baffled by his own discovery. “I don’t know why Pandora doesn’t move me as much, Bauhinia. But you… you move me so much with your average life. I can’t take it sometimes.”
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Tears, hot and sudden, welled in my eyes. I willed them not to fall, to stay pooled there so I could still see him clearly.
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“You live such a beautiful life,” he said, and his voice was full of a wonder that dismantled me. “I don’t know why. It’s not about the price I have to pay to woo that girl being low or high. It’s not a transaction. It’s whether you are moved. It’s an internal, inevitable response. Like a tide to the moon.” He paused, gathering the final, crucial thought. “Similarly, while I am a poor person, I am not cheap. My feeling for you isn’t a discounted emotion, born from having no better options. It is the deepest, most valuable response I am capable of. And it is yours.”
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The silence that followed was the most profound sound I had ever heard. It was filled with the hiss of the espresso machine, the distant sigh of a bus, the beating of my heart slowly settling from a panic into a deep, resonant rhythm. The live wire in my chest had been disconnected, not by a simple ‘no,’ but by a truth so vast and complex it demanded a whole new way of seeing. He had not just answered my question; he had rebuilt the world around it.
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He saw me. He truly saw me. Not the me I sometimes wished I was—glamorous, extraordinary, Pandora-like—but the me I actually was. And he found it beautiful. And he was moved by it.
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The wonder of that began to eclipse my insecurity. What was the greatness of a life that was average? Was it the freedom in its lack of spectacle? The authenticity that could only exist without a spotlight? The perfection in something not perfect—was it the humanity? A flawless diamond is cold. A river-worn stone holds the memory of every journey it has taken. Its imperfections are its story.
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I looked up at him. His eyes, always so thoughtful, were waiting, patient. He had handed me not just his heart, but a new lens for my own soul.
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Without a word, I pushed my chair back. I walked around the small table, the world narrowing to the space between us. He watched me, his breath still.
I stopped in front of him. I placed a hand on his cheek, feeling the faint stubble, the warmth of his skin under the cool dampness. I saw my reflection, small and whole, in his eyes.
“You move me, too,” I said, and it was the truest thing I had ever uttered.
I leaned down and kissed him.
It was not a dramatic, world-ending kiss. It was a beginning. It was quiet and soft, a seal on everything he had just said. It tasted of coffee and rain and a shocking, gentle certainty. His hand came up to cradle the back of my head, his fingers tangling in my wet hair, holding me not as something fragile, but as something precious, something real.
When we pulled apart, the world rushed back in—the steady rhythm of a city breathing around us. He rested his forehead against mine, and we stayed that way for a long moment, two people under an awning, perfectly average and utterly, hopelessly beautiful.
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and then Add to home screen.