The first time my friend brought me to see this boy, I knew it was going to rain because there was a loud banging noise, though it was neither the thunder nor the silver iodide rocket that I heard. The rain was just a drizzle but everyone on the street was wet, because it was supposed to be breezy the whole week, according to the weather forecast. He adjusted his hair by the reflection of the display windows of Just Cavalli. Aesthetic patterns of a mixture of Chinese and Western art covered his entire left arm, extending from his shoulder to his wrist. Around his neck was a long chain and the charm was a Buddha. He's not well-built or tall, just a regular boy with a mischievous and yet, sweet smile, full of tattoos on his left arm and his lower leg. He was in a plain white t-shirt and the mannequin in the window was in an all-black suit, so he could clearly see me staring at him through the reflection. I looked away right after we locked eyes in the translucent glass.
It was someone's birthday and we were heading to a restaurant they owned to drink. My friend worked for him but they seemed more like good friends than in a hierarchical bond. The things they did for a living were not the things you wanted to know about. My friend was like a brother to me, so I wasn't exactly intimidated by the people there because I knew he would keep an eye on me the whole time. The boy in white was greeted by his subordinates and he brought us to the balcony where we could have a barbecue. As the night passed by, I got to know him better through the games and chit-chats and the warm laughter that suffused the place. We all drank and drank, and I drank to forget while he drank to stay sane. It's not like I'm deliberately trying to make gangsters likable, but the people there were like us. They joked, they danced and sang, cooked me pasta when I said I was hungry and baked cakes for the birthday boy.
He wasn't like your can-I-have-your-number boy. Or your daily good morning texts. Or your regular just-checking-up-on-you boy. He's not always around. You couldn’t reach him anytime you want. Sometimes he's collecting money for the protection racket from some karaoke chain-stores. Sometimes he's waiting for a client to pick-up the goodies in the back alley. Or maybe sometimes he's in detainment in the Wan Chai police station. I would call him a shipwreck, but a ship doesn't wreck on its own. In this case, I was the shipwreck and he was the storm; a force of nature; something you couldn't control. It's hard to imagine someone like me would fall for someone like him. Sometimes I think it's because he reminded me of someone I used to know. I couldn't really control either of them. The only difference was that the second boy was so much worse. He was raw and barbaric but he was also fragile and affectionate. He was daring and fearless, and because he who feared nothing was fear itself. He asked me, "You scared?" when we were waiting in line to go into the haunted house at a theme park. "A little," I said. "Nothing intimidates you more than I do," he said with a playful tone. He held my hand and together we walked through hell.
How you love says a lot about how you live. And it goes the other way, too. At times I question myself if the things I feel are real because I'm the type of person who would write herself a world and go live in it. One time my friends and I went to his friend's party and they said alcohol wasn't enough. Most of his friends were faded. He was sitting on the couch, half-sober, and he gestured me to sit beside him. He looked right into my soul, wild-eyed, kaleidoscope pupils and ecstasy void. I thought I saw the devil in him. He leaned his head on my shoulder and held my hand tightly, fingers intertwined. His hand was shaking and his palms sweating. I made him drink plenty of water so he could sit up on his own, and I asked him if he was sober now. "Nobody is," he said. Back then I thought he was talking nonsense. But when I think about it now, he's probably right. We're never completely sane. Sometimes we confuse things with reality - like the times that we thought there was an insect up our legs when it was in fact just tickling on its own or felt the ferry moving when it's floating still on the water or felt my heart wriggling while I looked at him when it's just another suffocating sense of loneliness.
Sometimes when I passed by the karaoke shop where he had to chill with his clients and boss at, I would call him and ask him to drive me home. We didn't have much to talk about, and I think he knew that too, but we both enjoyed being in each other's company, even if it was for a twenty-minute ride home. And mainly it's because I wanted to make sure he was sober and in a good state.
We hadn't seen each other for almost six months and last night I saw his car parked outside the shop. My friend, the one who brought me to meet him the first time, said he was leaving soon, and that this would probably be the last time we'd see him. So we went upstairs to meet him in one of the rooms. He was lining powder on the table when I went inside. He was going to hide in China. They were coming for him, he said. Nobody knew how long that would be, but he wouldn't be coming back for a while. He's going to stay in the place where the milk powder is fake and the handbags are fake and the rain is fake. He put the powder into the cigarette paper tube he rolled and he kept smoking and smoking, one after another that I couldn’t even count how many he had. And it smelled like something was on fire; like burnt plastic. I went into the bathroom and I saw my reflection in the mirror. I looked like the April showers and I went out and watched him heat up another one that he rolled. Thin smoke rose and covered his eyes and he looked like the pouring rain on the unpredictable days of July in Summer. He rested his head on my lap and I brushed my fingers through his hair. The Earth would be swallowed up by the Sun in 7.6 billion years and unless until then, it wouldn't stop spinning just because we weren't on it anymore. I wished it could last just a bit longer before he left for China. But the world wouldn't care, would it? It wouldn't care about something that's not meant to be in the first place. He was too spaced out to drive so he gave me some money and asked my friend to send me home. He said he didn't want me to see him like this and he told me to go home as if he never wanted to see me again. Synthetic rain, synthetic drugs, synthetic sensations, synthetic love.
There's nothing romantic about it.
