*This is a story based on an idea from Alix Meadow. I am grateful for the contribution of ideas.106Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWShLyOKWbI
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The city of Hong Kong is a creature of steel and light, a roaring, vertical jungle that scrapes the underbelly of the clouds. But in its old, creaking bones, in neighbourhoods like Sham Shui Po, the city sits down, sighs, and shows its age. Here, the buildings are stacked like weary old men, their facades stained with decades of rain and exhaust. Washing lines strung between windows flutter with the faded flags of the everyday. The air is thick with the smell of sizzling fish balls, exhaust, and the faint, metallic tang of the Pearl River.
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In a building on Yu Chau Street, in a flat on the seventh floor, Juice lived.
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The flat was a single room, a concrete cell just big enough for one body and the ghosts it carried. There was a bed that folded into a couch that never did, a single-burner hotplate, and a window that looked out onto another window, ten feet away. The space was a silence, a pause in the city’s relentless sentence. It held her, but it did not comfort her. It was simply a container.
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The ghosts were quieter now. They didn’t shout anymore. They were echoes. The ghost of a laugh that used to bounce off these very walls. The ghost of a voice, too loud, too full of a grand, performative love that was all gum and no substance—sweet at first, then flavourless, then something you just wanted to get rid of without knowing where to spit it out. The ghost of a version of herself who believed in that noise, who mistook volume for value. That version had been burned away, leaving behind a husk, a woman who had learned that the loudest things are often the emptiest.
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On weeknights, she volunteered at the North Kowloon Public Library. It was a dusty, half-forgotten building, a relic from a different time, squatting resignedly between a bustling wet market and a neon-lit electronics mall. Inside, silence didn’t just exist; it had mass. It hung in the air, heavier than the old cloth-bound books on the highest shelves, a thick, velvety quiet that absorbed the occasional cough, the rustle of a page, the squeak of a trolley wheel.
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Juice liked the weight of it. It was a silence that felt like a balm. Here, she didn’t have to be anything. She could just be. Her job was to re-shelve returns, to guide the occasional lost student, to wipe down dusty shelves with a damp cloth. It was meditative. It was a world of quiet order, a stark contrast to the chaotic, noisy ruin of her past.
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And it was there she met him.
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He wasn’t remarkable. That was the first thing she noticed. Or, rather, the first thing she didn’t notice. He was a man in his late thirties or early forties, with a quietness about him that seemed inherent, not chosen. He wore simple trousers and plain shirts, his hair was neither neat nor messy. He moved through the aisles with a familiar, unhurried purpose, like a fish moving through deep, known water.
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He never spoke. Not to her, not to anyone. He would come in every Tuesday and Thursday evening, just after seven. He’d nod once, a minute dip of the chin that was less a greeting and more an acknowledgement of shared space, and then he’d disappear into the Philosophy and Classics section.
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He borrowed old, dense-looking texts. Schopenhauer. Kierkegaard. Lao Tzu. Books with spines so cracked they seemed held together by will alone. Juice was the one who checked them in and out. She’d scan the barcodes, her fingers brushing against the worn covers. She began to anticipate his choices, to feel a flicker of curiosity about the mind that sought out such dense, quiet company.
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One Thursday, as she was checking in his latest return—a battered copy of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus—the book fell open to a heavily annotated page. Her eyes, against her will, snagged on a underlined sentence: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
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And next to it, in the margin, written in a small, precise, blue-inked hand, was a note:
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“Some words don’t need voices. Just readers.”
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Juice snapped the book shut, her heart performing a strange, arrhythmatic stutter. It felt like she had stumbled upon something naked, something intensely private. She hadn’t meant to look. But the words echoed in the silence of her own mind. Some words don’t need voices.
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She reshelved the book with a new kind of reverence. The following week, when he borrowed a collection of Buddhist sutras, she found herself checking the margins almost as soon as he left. There it was again, the neat blue script. Next to a passage on the nature of desire and suffering, he had written: “To let the wound air is not to pick at it.”
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It wasn’t love. It was nothing like before. There was no quickening pulse of infatuation, no dizzying, gum-chewing fantasy of a future. There was no illusion. This was something else entirely. It was quiet. It was space. It was reflection.
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He was a mirror, but not one that showed her face. He showed her the shape of a silence she recognized. His marginalia were messages in bottles, not sent to anyone, just released into the ocean of text. And she, by some quiet current, had found them.
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One night, sitting at the small formica table in her flat, the ghost of her old self seemed to breathe down her neck. That girl had been so loud, so full of words she’d later regret, poems she’d written that were all fireworks and no substance, letters she’d poured her heart into only to have them used as kindling for someone else’s ego. She had swallowed her words for so long, believing they were worthless, that they had caused the noise that eventually broke her.
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But here was a man who said nothing, yet spoke volumes in the margins of forgotten books. He wrote not for an audience, but for the act itself. For the need to converse with the text, to leave a mark of his own understanding.
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She pulled out a sheaf of paper, the kind she used for grocery lists. Her pen hovered. The silence in the flat was no longer just an absence; it was a presence. It was an invitation.
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She didn’t write for him. She wrote for herself. Words she had once swallowed, now finally finding air. They were clumsy at first, rusty and stiff. A few lines about the light on the wet market pavement after rain. A memory of her grandmother’s hands. A simple observation about the weight of the library’s silence.
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The next time he returned a book—a volume of Seneca’s letters—she slipped her note between the pages. It wasn’t a response. It was a parallel thought. She wrote: “The mangoes in the market are perfectly ripe. Their scent is a quiet yellow.”
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She didn’t know if he would find it. She didn’t know if he would care. But the act of releasing the words, of sending them out into the quiet, felt like a monumental act of reclamation.
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A week later, he returned the Seneca. Her heart thudded dully as she processed it. She waited until her break, until she was sitting in the small staff room with a cup of lukewarm tea, to open it. Her note was still there. But beneath her sentence, in that familiar blue ink, was a single word:
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“Yes.”
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A conversation had begun. A conversation without voices, without names, without any expectation. It was the purest exchange she had ever known.
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She wrote about the old man who mended shoes on the corner, his hands a map of a long life. She wrote about the exhaustion of carrying a past that felt like a physical weight. She never signed her name. He never asked.
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He responded not with advice, but with reflection. Next to her note on exhaustion, he had written in his own book, and she found it weeks later: “The weight is the work. The carrying is the living.”
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Months bled into one another. The humid summer air gave way to the crisp, slightly smoky breath of autumn. Juice’s flat was no longer just a container for a body and its ghosts. It was becoming a workshop for a soul. Scraps of paper covered her table, filled with her thoughts, her observations, her small, hard-won epiphanies. The ghosts were still there, but they were quieter now, respectful, like audience members at a recital.
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She was writing again. Properly. Not for a lover, not for praise, but for the sheer, essential need to give form to the things inside her. The man in the library, with his blue-inked breadcrumbs, had shown her the way, but she was now walking the path herself.
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She knew, with a certainty that felt as solid as the library’s old stone steps, that it was coming to an end. This strange, wordless fellowship had served its purpose. It had been a bridge from one side of her life to the other. She had crossed it.
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On a cool Thursday evening in November, she brought her final note. It was written on a clean, white piece of paper. The words were simple. They were all she needed to say.
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He was there, as always. He nodded his familiar, minimal nod and moved towards the philosophy stacks. Her hands were steady as she checked in his returns. It was a text by Wittgenstein. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” It felt fitting.
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As she processed the book, she slipped her note between the final pages. She didn’t need to check for a response. She didn’t need to see if he would write back.
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The note said: “Thank you for the silence.”
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It was not a farewell to him, not exactly. It was a thank you for the space he had inadvertently held for her. A thank you for the reflection. A thank you for the permission his quiet existence had given her to find her own.
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The following Tuesday, she did not go to the library. She had already called the volunteer coordinator and given her notice, citing a change in her schedule. She packed a small bag, bought a single ticket for the Star Ferry, and crossed Victoria Harbour as the sun began to set. The skyscrapers of Central glittered like a forest of glass and ambition, but she was not going there.
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She found a quiet spot on the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade and watched as the city began to light up, one building at a time, a spectacular, silent fireworks display. She thought of the library, of the dust motes dancing in the evening light, of the weight of the silence. She thought of the man with the blue pen, and she hoped he found another reader for his quiet words.
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She felt a profound sense of peace. The work was not done; the carrying would always be the living. But she was no longer carrying the past. She was carrying her words. She was carrying her silence. She was carrying herself.
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And when the last of the light faded from the sky, painting it in shades of deep violet and bruised orange, Juice turned from the water.
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This time, she would not look back.
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and then Add to home screen.