The air in the Tai Po public housing estate was always thick, a permanent stew of frying oil, damp concrete, and the cloying sweetness of the bakery on the ground floor. It clung to your clothes, your hair, the back of your throat. My world was a mosaic of crowded footbridges, the incessant rattle of the MTR, and the tiny, boxy flats stacked like shipping containers, each one holding its own silent, pressurized drama. I lived in one. He lived in another, in the block they called Baby’s Breath. The name was a cruel, beautiful joke, a whisper of delicate white flowers against a brutalist landscape of grey reinforced concrete. And he was the cruelest, most beautiful joke of all.
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His name was Kei, but in the secret taxonomy of my heart, I called him Grape Chewing Gum. It was the first thing he ever offered me, a single stick of purplish foil-wrapped gum, pulled from the pocket of his worn jeans with a shy, awkward flourish. The synthetic, candy sweetness of it, so bold and unapologetic, became the taste of him. It was the taste of our entire, stunted affair.
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His face was not conventionally handsome. It was a landscape of interesting misfortunes: a nose that had clearly been broken and poorly set, eyes set a fraction too deep and a fraction too far apart, giving him a perpetual, sorrowful look, like a medieval saint painted by an artist who had only heard descriptions of human beauty. His mouth was too wide, and when he smiled, which was rare, it was a lopsided, breathtaking event that transformed the awkwardness into something uniquely compelling. He was ugly, and he was beautiful, and he knew only the first part was true.
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We always met at the same fast-food restaurant, a brightly lit, noisy cathedral of Formica and plastic. It was neutral ground, a place where the pressure of our respective tiny homes couldn’t reach us. We’d sit for hours, nursing cups of iced lemon tea that we’d refill until the ice melted into sad, watery slush. It was there, under the relentless fluorescent lights that highlighted every pore and flaw, that he would unfold his dreams for me. They were never about me. They were always about a life, a concept, a geography.
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“I often went to Japan because it was a place of sorrowful beauty,” he said one evening, his long fingers tracing the condensation on his cup. His ugly face was tilted down, but his eyes were looking at something a thousand miles away. “Not like here. Here, things are just sad. A leaking pipe is sad. A cockroach in the rice cooker is sad. But there… in Kyoto, in the old districts… the sadness is different. It’s baked into the wood of the ancient temples. It’s in the moss growing over a stone lantern in a forgotten garden. It’s beautiful because it accepts its own decay. It doesn’t fight it. We just fight it. We fight the decay every day, and we lose, and it just makes us tired and bitter.”
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I listened, mesmerized as always by the poetry that came from this most un-poetic of men. He spoke of the mono no aware, the pathos of things, the gentle sadness of transience. He described the quiet of a Shinjuku back-alley izakaya at midnight, the fierce blush of maple leaves in autumn, the weight of history in the stones of Fushimi Inari. He painted these vivid, aching landscapes with his words, and he was always the lonely, solitary figure walking through them.
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And then, he would bring it home. The dream would curdle. “I just want a family,” he’d say, his voice dropping back into its familiar, pragmatic monotone. “A simple life. A wife. Maybe a son and a daughter. A small, clean flat. Not like my parents’ place. That place is a tomb. But something… orderly. Predictable.”
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He never expressed his love for me. Not once. The words were like stones lodged in his throat, too heavy, too dangerous to dislodge. Instead, he offered me this blueprint for a future in which I was a key component, yet utterly unnamed. He complained about the means, never acknowledging the woman sitting right in front of him as the obvious end.
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“My face,” he’d mutter, gesturing vaguely towards it as if it were a poorly behaved pet he was forced to take everywhere. “Look at it. How could I ever get a girlfriend? Flirting is not my strong suit. I don’t know the words. I see men smooth-talking women in bars, and it’s like watching a magic trick in a foreign language. I don’t understand the mechanics.”
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My heart would break and boil simultaneously. “You don’t need to flirt,” I’d insist, leaning across the sticky table. “You just need to be honest. You just need to say what you feel.”
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But he would shake his head, his gaze fixed on a distant point past my shoulder, somewhere in the direction of the self-service drink machine. “Feelings are messy. A family is a structure. Feelings come and go. A structure remains.”
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For a long time, I lived inside the fantasy I built from his broken pieces. On the MTR ride home, pressed against strangers, I would close my eyes and imagine it. I imagined him finally finding the courage, not with flowery words, but with a simple, gruff statement: “We should get married.” I imagined us moving into his parents’ tiny flat after they passed, a grim inheritance of faded linoleum and walls thin as paper. I imagined the frustrations: arguing over money, the lack of space, the relentless heat of a Hong Kong summer with only a single window unit fighting a losing battle. But I also imagined the sweetness. The quiet solidarity of sharing a blanket on a too-small sofa. His large, clumsy hands handing me a cup of tea after a long day. The silent understanding that we had built something, however small and imperfect, together. It would be a frustratingly sweet, poor family, and it would be ours. It was a modest dream, a tiny, flickering candle in the vast darkness of this city, but it was everything to me.
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It didn’t happen. The fantasy remained a figment, a ghost that haunted the space between our lemon tea cups.
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Grape Chewing Gum always wanted me to make the move. He was a strategist waiting for his opponent to commit their forces first. “Love is not on my mind,” he’d state, a ridiculous, blatant lie from a man who spent every free moment with me, sharing his most intimate thoughts about sorrow and beauty and structure. “It’s a distraction. I am focused on my goals. A family is the goal. The… courtship part is just a confusing obstacle.”
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The absurdity of it would finally overwhelm my patience. “How could we have a family if you don’t confess your love for me?” I protested, my voice a sharp whisper that cut through the chatter of families eating cheap fried chicken. “A family isn’t built on a business plan, Kei! It’s built on… on this!” I gestured wildly between us, at the electric, unspoken thing that had been humming for years.
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He would flinch, as if my directness was a physical slap. His resolve would harden, a defensive wall sliding into place. He would retreat into his favourite sanctuary: Japan.
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“There would be plenty to talk about if we are to be married, so there is no need for flirting now,” he would say, so shyly it was almost inaudible, his cheeks flushing a faint red. “We could talk about the places we would go. The Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto. We could walk it in the spring, when the cherry blossoms fall like pink snow. Or the island of Miyajima, with the great torii gate that looks like it’s floating at high tide. See? We have so many things to discuss. Why waste time on things that are so… difficult to say?”
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And there it was. He could give me a thousand words about the aesthetic principles of Japanese garden design, but he could not give me three words about his own heart. He could map out a future filled with scenic beauty, but he could not navigate the simple, terrifying distance from his soul to mine.
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I began to see our outings for what they were: not dates, but auditions. I was auditioning for the role of Wife in the play he had written and titled “A Satisfactory Family Life.” The lead role, Lover, was not in the script. He was the director, waiting to see if I could embody the part without him having to bother with the messy, illogical backstory of romance.
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The sadness that followed these meetings was a physical weight. It was heavier than the humid Tai Po air. It was the grief of loving a man who was a locked box, and realizing that the key was not something I could find or steal, because he had thrown it away long ago and convinced himself it had never existed.
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The end was not dramatic. It was as quiet and resigned as he was. We were at our usual table. The air smelled of grease and disinfectant. He was describing the precise, melancholic sound of a temple bell in Nara, how it echoed across the ancient woods, a clean, lonely sound that hung in the air long after it was struck.
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I wasn’t listening. I was watching his mouth, the mouth that could describe the sublime but could not form the words “I want you.” And I knew, with a cold, clear certainty, that it never would. I was waiting for an echo that would never come.
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I interrupted him. “Kei,” I said, my voice surprisingly steady. “I’m leaving.”
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He stopped mid-sentence, about the specific species of deer in Nara park. He blinked. “Oh. Okay. Next week? Your cousin’s birthday, right? I can wait.”
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“No,” I said. “I’m leaving you.”
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The confusion on his face was genuine, utter, and complete. It was the most honest expression I had ever seen him wear. “Why?” he asked, and there was no anger, no hurt, just pure, unadulterated bewilderment, as if I had just announced I was moving to Mars. “What’s wrong?”
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What was wrong? Everything. The beautiful, sorrowful architecture of his avoidance. The loneliness of being so close to someone living in a different emotional country. The taste of grape chewing gum that had gone stale.
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“I need more than scenic destinations and philosophical concepts, Kei,” I said, standing up. “I need words. I need the words.”
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He looked up at me, his ugly, beautiful face a mask of sincere puzzlement. “But… we have so many words,” he said softly, pleadingly. “We have all the words about everything that matters.”
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And in that moment, I saw the true, unbridgeable chasm between us. He truly believed that. To him, the words for love were superfluous, decorative, unnecessary. The blueprint was the thing. The feeling was an unreliable foundation. He could not comprehend that his words about Japan were just a magnificent, elaborate roof on a house that had no walls.
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“No, Kei,” I said, my heart breaking for the final time. It was a clean break, like the sound of his imaginary temple bell. “We don’t.”
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I turned and walked away, out of the bright, noisy restaurant, leaving him sitting there, surrounded by all the wrong words. I didn’t look back. The humid night air hit my face, a familiar, oppressive blanket. I walked towards the MTR station, towards the next guy, towards a future that was uncertain, but one that at least held the possibility of a different kind of language.
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Sometimes, years later, when I smell synthetic grape scent or see a travel poster for Kyoto, I think of him. I wonder if he ever found his family, his structure. I wonder if he ever took a wife to walk the Philosopher’s Path and explained to her the mono no aware of it all. And I hope, for his sake and for hers, that somewhere along that path of falling cherry blossoms, he finally found the three simple, terrifying, beautiful words that he had spent a lifetime believing were not important enough to say.
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and then Add to home screen.