The unsweetened

 

When someone is on your mind, they can appear in any capricious format, popping by here and there, now and then, everywhere or nowhere near. They become any bottled beverages when you’re indecisively hanging in front of the two-metre fridge in the convenience store, hot or chilled, overly sugary or unsweetened, still or sparkling. Sliding the glass door back and forth, sends you a good sense of summer and a resemblance to childhood, or it echoes with the act of blowing into a fan, when the rotating blades reflect your fragmented language and out-of-sense sounds, which reminds you not of summer, but a sense of, idleness, the lack of an outlet. For your internal urges to speak or in terms of relational bonds. They can also appear in every corner of the streets, familiar or alien, but just around the corner, by the railings that the authorities have rebuilt, or beneath the long-forgotten, old-fashioned, and indiscernible road signs that signify a bit of, the Hong Kong we were not even born in. They show up unanticipated, just knocking on your heart abruptly as if a long-distance first love had flown all the way from one end to another across the globe with their overweight luggage filled with all of the nostalgic, high-calories sweets and savouries made from your homeland, and gone straight to the apartment that you shared with other acquaintances and flatmates who possessed different life goals and trajectories originally than yourself but ended up sharing the same fate of being foreign, diasporic, accented. And yes they would arrive before you with an awkward yet melting, honeyed, and embarrassingly devoted, smile. And you would offer this slow-knowing smile back, have some tears unexpectedly shed, and some drops of them would even have some of the snowflakes melted into some petals before your eyes, even if there hadn’t been any snow at all. Even the scene of the snow was just in your head, fictitious enough to be vividly real, more realistic than a merely imagined, constructed imagery that conjures up and implies the slightly melancholic ending.