The poverty was the first thing we exchanged, like a secret handshake or a token of membership to a club nobody wanted to join. It was our introduction, our common ground, our bleak foundation.
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“I am poor.” Apple Soft Candy said. The words came out flat, a simple statement of fact, like announcing the weather. He said it on our first… it wasn’t a date. It was a meeting. We were sitting on a low wall outside the Diamond Hill MTR station, watching the world stream past in a blur of better suits and sharper haircuts.
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“So am I,” I said. It wasn’t a competition, but a confirmation. A mutual acknowledgement of our place in the city’s intricate hierarchy. We were at the bottom, looking up at a skyline we could never afford to be a part of.
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He nodded, his eyes on the cracked pavement. “I am lowly educated.”
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“So am I,” I replied. Another point of connection. Another shared failure, or rather, a shared consequence of a life that had offered few choices. My education had ended when my father’s health did; his, he later told me, when the money for school fees ran out. We were self-taught in the language of struggle.
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“We cannot afford housing to get married,” he said, finally looking at me. This wasn’t a proposition. It was a eulogy for a future that had died before it was ever conceived. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me, because it was the most honest.
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“I agree,” I said. And I did. In a city where a square foot of space cost more than our combined monthly wages, marriage wasn’t a celebration; it was a financial contract we were irrevocably disqualified from. We had just outlined the entire, pathetic blueprint of our potential life together in four sentences. I thought that such brutal, unadorned commonality was a form of intimacy. I thought it was a solid rock to build on. I was, of course, an idiot. Hindsight is a merciless teacher.
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Apple Soft Candy was the guy I was destined to miss out on. Not in a dramatic, star-crossed lovers way, but in a quiet, fizzling, administrative error sort of way. Our story wasn’t a tragedy; it was a form left unfilled, a coupon expired before it was ever redeemed.
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We didn’t even hold hands. Our physical contact was limited to the accidental brush of a sleeve on the MTR, or the shifting of weight on that low wall that brought our knees momentarily close. We didn’t kiss. We certainly didn’t have sex. We did nothing. We were archivists of a relationship that never happened, cataloguing its non-events with a strange, shared dedication.
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I often wondered, in the years that followed, why Apple Soft Candy wanted us to be together at all. What was the point of this chaste, grim companionship? We didn’t make each other laugh. We didn’t inspire each other. We mostly just confirmed each other’s deepest suspicions about the world. Perhaps he was just lonely. Perhaps I was simply a warm body in a nearby seat, a listener for his sighs. Or perhaps, in his own inarticulate way, he was practicing. Rehearsing for a role he knew he would never get to play.
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He was the first person who made me wonder what love actually was. Unlike ordinary girls, I had no dreams of romance. My fantasies were practical: a flat with a window that opened onto something other than another wall, a job that didn’t make my soul feel thin and worn, a week without the gnawing anxiety of a dwindling bank balance. Prince Charming was a fool who would have bankrupted himself trying to find a glass slipper that fit in this town. Love was a luxury good, like imported cheese or a holiday abroad. I couldn’t afford it.
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The details of him have faded now, lost to the relentless blandness of those afternoons. I cannot picture his face. Was his nose broad or narrow? Did he have a mole? I don’t know. I remember his hands, though. They were broad, with short, clean fingers, often resting on his knees as if too heavy to lift. But the thing I remember most vividly is his sigh.
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Apple Soft Candy sighed over and over during our dates. It was a soft, wet, internal sound, like a door closing deep inside his chest. It wasn’t a sigh of boredom or frustration directed at me. It was the sound of a man carrying a weight so constant it had become part of his respiration. A sigh for the bus that was late, for the rain that started, for the price of a bowl of noodles, for the impossible future. I learned to measure the time between his sighs. They were the punctuation of our non-romance.
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He lived in Peony House at So Uk. The name was another one of the city’s cruel little jokes, bestowing the title of a beautiful, delicate flower upon a brutalist slab of concrete. I went to his flat once. Just once. It was a white block, slightly yellowed by decades of grime and exhaust fumes, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with its identical twins. A vertical filing cabinet for people.
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Everything inside was simple. Not minimalist, but simple. A single bed pushed against a wall. A small table with two chairs. A thermos for tea. A thin towel folded neatly on a rack. There were no books, no posters, no photographs. It was a place for existing, not for living. It was a waiting room.
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We didn’t do anything. He didn’t offer me a tour; there was nothing to see. He didn’t say anything that left any impression. We had long since exhausted our shared topics of conversation: our poorness, our lowly education, our unaffordable futures. Silence was our final frontier.
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He put on some music. It was a soft piano piece, something melancholic and meandering. It sounded like the soundtrack to a rain-soaked window. He sat down close to me on the edge of the single bed, the only place to sit. The springs groaned a protest. The air grew thick. I could feel the heat from his arm next to mine.
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He turned his head. His lips were next to mine. They were chapped. I could smell the faint, clean scent of his soap and the staleness of his breath. He didn’t move. He didn’t lean in. He just… positioned himself. An offering. An invitation.
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Thinking back, an eternity later, I wondered if he wanted me to kiss him. Of course he did. It was the logical next step in the script of a normal courtship. A first kiss. A beginning.
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But I didn’t. My mind was a blank, white screen. I had no reference point for this. My body was frozen. It wasn’t fear or disgust. It was a profound, paralyzing confusion. What was the protocol for kissing a man you had already agreed you had no future with? What was the point of starting a story you had already written the ending for?
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He simply closed his eyes and waited with anticipation. It was the most vulnerable thing I had ever seen. His face, usually a mask of resigned acceptance, was soft, expectant. He was waiting for me to bridge the gap, to make the decision, to inject a moment of feeling into our feelingless arrangement.
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It seemed like an eternity. The piano notes drifted through the tiny, yellowed room. The traffic hummed faintly from eight stories below. My heart was a frantic bird beating against my ribs, but the rest of me was stone.
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He wanted me to kiss him.
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I had never kissed anyone.
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The silence stretched, thin and sharp as a wire. The moment curdled. The anticipation in his face slowly drained away, replaced by a familiar, weary resignation. He had offered the one thing he had left that wasn’t a statement of fact—a possibility—and I had rejected it by doing nothing.
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“I want a happily ever after,” I said suddenly, the words escaping my mouth before my brain could vet them. I wasn’t too sure what I meant. I didn’t mean a prince or a palace. I think I meant an end to the sighing. I meant a reason to stop counting the cost of everything. I meant a future that wasn’t a foreclosed conclusion. It was a plea from a part of me I didn’t know existed.
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He opened his eyes. There was no anger in them. Just a deep, bottomless sadness. If he wanted to fuck, he didn’t say it. The moment for that, for anything, had passed. The fragile spell was broken.
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Instead, he hugged me. It was a strange, stiff hug. His arms went around my shoulders, and mine hung limp for a second before I awkwardly patted his back. It wasn’t passionate or even particularly comforting. It was a hug of mutual consolation. A hug for the road not taken, for the kiss not given, for the future we couldn’t afford. It was a goodbye hug, though I didn’t know it yet.
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It seemed to have lasted for a while. We stood there in the middle of his simple room, two lonely people holding onto each other not for desire, but because we were the only two people in the world who understood the precise dimensions of the box we were trapped in.
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Then I left. I mumbled something about the time, about work the next day. He nodded and held the door open for me. He didn’t walk me to the MTR.
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He never called me after that time. I never called him either. Our entire relationship had been a sustained note of resignation, and my failure to kiss him was the final, silent cadence that ended it. There was nothing more to say. We had said it all in our first four sentences.
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Sometimes, I think of him. Not with regret, but with a dull, persistent ache. Apple Soft Candy. A man named after a cheap, sweet treat, who showed me the bitter, unadorned skeleton of love without any of its flesh. He taught me that love wasn’t about grand gestures or fairy tales. It was, perhaps, about the courage to kiss someone even when you know there’s no happily ever after. It was about creating a moment of beauty in an ugly, simple room, even if it’s just for a little while. And I, frozen by fear and a poverty of spirit that was deeper than my poverty of means, had failed the test. I had chosen the sigh over the kiss. And in doing so, I had missed out on the only real thing he, or anyone, had ever offered me.
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and then Add to home screen.