to take my mind off stuff, i was watching City of Glass on Youtube earlier tonight. Leon Lai, Shu Qi, Daniel Wu and Nicola Cheung star in this movie, one of my favorite Hong Kong movies of all time. when i watched City of Glass in 1998, i remember how my heart stopped during the scene in the University of Hong Kong stairwell where Leon Lai and Shu Qi first locked eyes amidst all the laughing students hosing and pouring buckets of water on each other. Leon Lai… he and i go way back. i first found him in my neighbor’s house when her brother was singing karaoke to one of Leon Lai’s songs. i was six years old then. now i am twenty, and it’s been about seven years since my neighbour’s brother passed away. but Leon Lai still stops my heart. and he will always remind me of Kar Hou holding the microphone and belting out cantopop in the living room. one time when i was about eight, my grandmother got a stroke and all the adults immediately bolted out of the house to rush her to the hospital, leaving me alone at home. i remember being absolutely petrified. so Kar Hou took me over to their place to have dinner. i refused to eat, but he coaxed me into eating by making aeroplane noises with the spoon and challenging me to catch the aerospoon in my mouth. how i giggled, and how he laughed. it is a scene that is exhuming a lot of forgotten feelings from within me. i wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he was my first love. oh, that smile. that accent left over from Adelaide. that earring. when he died, we were all stunned. as i watched City of Glass earlier tonight, i thought of him and missed him.

******

i’ve always dreamed of flying. in 48 hours i will be doing just that. in 48 hours i will have fallen asleep and slipped into delicate dreams that i wont remember when i awake. where will i awake?

if there were a sound for silence, it would sound like stars. and if there were a sound for the shining of stars, it would sound like a million needles falling together, the tinkling crashing of their dissonance playing in an infinite loop that never seems drudging or tiresome. instead, this limitless sound feels naturally eternal. if you listen to it long enough as it rings in your ears, sometimes you can hear the truth.

after i hung up the phone, i sat for a long time listening to the sound of silence. it is such a passively piercing sound. but its permanence comforted me. it also didnt expect anything from me, and that liberated me. it is a kind of liberation where i’m sitting in a booth. a very small booth. we always think that freedom is a vast open field where we can run and flail our arms and air our screams of victory… but all those histrionics are demanded from us by the blue skies and endless green grass. we see before us an expanse of verdant, sloping hills, and our instincts tell us to run and chase the wind. but why? why do our instincts impose such expectations on us? what if i want to just sit on the grass, in that very spot i appeared in, and just sleep? i dont want to run with wide open arms and scream; all i want to do is be idle. and that’s why my liberation came in the form of a small phone booth with no phone. here, nobody can find me.

and thus, i can heal myself. far, far, far removed from the toxic aid of humanity.