Confession flooded out that summer, the season of typhoons recorded in news, in memory, in that sweat-soaked scent and taste of your body, in my tongue. My mother and aunty snapped and slapped me though neither remember to this date which I doubt. But what can doubt signify except pain and guilt and if you are like this I will abandon you I will never love you you will be better off dead? In year two I borrowed your sci-fi book with an intention of never returning it back to you unless you return me love. In year three you kissed me once and never again. In whichever year I cannot remember I learned and memorised this line of that poem from that collection called 诗经 or Book of Songs/Poems and it goes [执子之手，与子偕老] which would lose all its puncture and punch when translated into English though here it is and there you go: holding thy hand, growing old with thee. What’s missing here is Sigmund Freud, by which I mean James Strachey the translator, by which I mean MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA.
Tonight I am filthy I am filled with nicotine. Tonight which is just like any other night you are not with me and I don’t want you here either. But tonight it is the same night that I relentlessly clean my room, brush my hair, listen to 张国荣/Leslie Cheung singing 月亮代表我的心/The Moon Represents My Heart, and mourn for a cinematic excellency that captures the density of loss and pain and guilt in evocative 80s dim colour and pensive melody.
No cinematic act could counterfeit
the hands we hold tight tonight
in the dim Hong Kong street-
light.
But nostalgia is poison so I actively decide to live and mourn for this moment. I walk out. I look up. There is the moon. The moon, hanging, crescent, represents my heart. And I live this moment:
my right hand reaches for
you in the dark;
absence = more present, in which there is
no remedy no melody but pain. And it is good. It is very good.
