"If they were fragments, make each piece sharp"
"If they were fragments, make each piece sharp"
Originally published on Asia Art Archive on 13 March 2025 (https://aaa.org.hk/en/like-a-fever/like-a-fever/if-they-were-fragments-make-each-piece-sharp/type/poetry-fiction).
Zero: Ephemera; or, even mayflies understand time
No one can stop me from doing something (but you can hide the knife from me); except myself. Whilst, “I can do anything for you.” I want to whisper to every one of you, closely in your ears.
I have finally reached the sea surface, faintly breathing, with fingertips convulsing, or swaying. I have entrusted my last breath to what remains, so I can listen in, and I can regurgitate. Like a parent bird, nurturing immature birds in their state of fledging. Gradually and gently, they are armoured with tiny hearts, and semi-transparent wings in sequence. When I pop a pill and it breaks through the tin foil packaging, it is like a newborn hatchling. Peppering the pills for the first time is as shocking as first love, while the Nth time of “it” boomeranging back, (still) feels (extra)ordinary.
One moment I see a cigarette stubbed to the edge, the next moment a new one is intact, lit, and burning; just like how my father masters his job, a bus driver who would start the engine from Yuen Long, the next moment he would find himself in Hong Kong Island; out of habit, out of familiarity to the point of being soulless—the auto-pilot of memory and muscle. Auto-piloting synonymises with having your thoughts at a distance. Like flying a kite, you pull, slide, tug; the kite on the other end, exiled far away until it scatters, diminishes, and concludes.
Mayflies are known as ephemeral, but they are conscious of their short-lived, year-long life. Every creature knows its own time, except for me; I had to constantly persuade myself, reciting and declaring to myself, “Not now, not today.” “I can’t see myself at forty, to be honest. Surprised I made it to thirty,” says the father in the film Aftersun. Mayflies find their resting place, knowing life, knowing the world, knowing seasons, even if it’s brief, fleeting.
I pushed away everything I needed most, until my inner despair was fulfilled and validated. Then I could breathe in relief; and the cycle continued. It marches in my heart. Will the rumble become a final echo? I, therefore, hear, and hum again.
One: Where saltwater meets freshwater
“Look! Waves.” (Κοίτα! Κύματα.)—C taught me this phrase in Greek that sounds like Japanese when pronounced, “Ki-ta! Ki-ma-ta.” (And when I looked up the meaning in Japanese, it means “the chance has come.”) C and I sailed from Athens towards the island of Sifnos in Greece. While exploring the island’s rocky shores, my swimming skills failed me, and I kept getting scraped by the large rocks and bled. C told me, when the waves come, don’t hold onto any rocks forcibly—the tighter you grab them, the more you get hurt, because the waves will push you into the rocks, pulling your skin back and forth. And if you have an open wound, dive back in because the water stings and heals. (Synchronising with something rudimentary and intrinsic about the world? Like, how touching a strand of nettle can cause an allergic reaction, whereas nettle itself can be used to cure allergies?)
When I saw C again, I went to Ioannina, a mountainous city in northern Greece, to celebrate her 24th. We stayed in a ground-floor shop that she rented as home; we cooked without recipes, chatted about a constellation of topics, drank, smoked, and slept. We visited Konitsa and hiked to the monastery atop the mountain. There was a split moment she tied her hair in a ponytail swiftly before my eyes, her blond hair glimmering; and countless swallows darted overhead among the mountains, one after another, swooping like time. No, not like time. They were somehow time itself. I whispered quietly so as not to intrude on the tranquillity, “I wish you the best, Darling.”
Watching And Your Bird Can Sing, set in Hakodate, brought me back to our memorable city abruptly and precipitously. The love triangle in the film, the frowns of the three, their spree, intoxication, and rhythm, fill the screen like hot air balloons levitating above an idyllic terrain. The film ignited some uncontrollable and unprecedented excitement inside me, as if I was standing motionless on a highway corridor during rush hour. Excited for two days without a pinch of sleepiness, I felt like I had a million languages ready to burst from my lips, eager to blurt out and vent them all. (Anything could have been a window for releasing the excessive energies, be it a mosquito, a person, or a single word. Words spoken in haste. Cold to the point of shivering. The vehicles race speedily at me. Wind rushing, electric sparks fly and float, the horn whistling long and loud—)
“Heightened mania is a side effect of the antidepressant,” she, the professional, said. But honestly, I was also professional in my own right. I had made efforts, through various means executed on my body and mind, that had inadvertently fuelled the growth and spread of the illness. In the experiences of toying with it or being toyed by its symptoms, I had been, persistently and consistently, so sophisticated. However, in the presence of the “more professional,” I could only nod and comply. (All my actions start with what I know, or don’t. In the name of love, or not. The heart anchors. Shackles and self-imprisonment. The dark night approaches. Take care of your spirit.) “Life is indeed, very, fucking insane,” I couldn’t help murmuring, in fragments. (You would only feel it for enough, if you cherish life.)
Everything was on a double loop of symptoms and side effects, just like the subway I once rode in Glasgow with my Irish girl, H. The lady next to us asked which train direction she should take to reach a station. H smiled and said, “This is a loop line. You can’t go wrong, whichever direction you take, will lead you to the same place.”
Where saltwater meets freshwater—it’s where the seawater, the rain, the tears—these natural streams gently intermingle and swirl. After the doses were raised, tears that used to drown me halted by an intangible levee, the tiniest ocean concealed inside me. I wiped my tears with a tissue, the soaked, damp spots made me realise the distance between my eyes. Seemingly farther apart than anything else; yet, I failed to see anything with a proper distance.
The feeling of “being alive” dawned on me—the inability to eat, sleep, and sober up; an immersion in unworthiness, a state of not being knocked off, and not dying. A war raged within, a hail of bullets. Dusk after the rain, the moon ascending gradually in the elevator; that was a benign moment to bid farewell. Slapping myself mentally, “Wake the fuck up, dear. I am alive, and I should live.”
“Don’t do the thing that you can’t turn back from,” the doctor said. I wanted to tell her frankly that, Doctor, not only the thing you point to or the event and act you never ever clarified or dared to mention, which was beyond my control and say and out of my jurisdiction, but also the thoughts and things that unconsciously flooded my mind, haunted me, and returned to me relentlessly, were also things I couldn’t turn back from; Doctor, nothing can ever be turned back from. Everything is irreversible, by nature. For real.
Two: A crowded bar
Its ignition time had no head or tail, no beginning or end; I was lost in the erupting and lingering time, unclear, unfathomable.
They told me they were called Nicholas, murmuring in my ear, being just a voice emitted and amplified from my mind. They occasionally appeared, never tame or gentle with pleasing words. Instead, they told me, “You do a lot of things in failure, and this time, if you do it, you have to succeed,” or, “Wait until your next life.” There was a private theatre, playing films and clips all day long in severe times like a horror marathon in my mind. I saw myself bathed in blood, wrists open, witnessing myself falling from different heights. My head cracked with leaked juice. (Buy a ticket. Enter the cinema. Take your seat. Watch and enjoy your own premieres.) My olive eyes were wide open but immobile, battling with this “civil war” surging from within. Senses. Unconsciousness. In my distracted gaze, being oblivious, I dissociated.
If F and S had left me in Jardine House that night, I think I would have exhausted my last strength, walking to the edge of Glenealy and committing that—something. I confessed to them that many strangers were watching and following me. I heard each drop of rain that was hurting and attacking me. I appeared motionless, stagnant, unable to bear any sound or light. Even that tiny light from the air conditioner was insufferable, followed by endless hallucinations and extreme oversensitivity. I started losing sleep and, amid the sleeplessness, I resisted fervently, hearing my veins pulsate, letting the “main effects” and “side effects” kick in, like a devoted pianist with twitching eyes, swaying back and forth at performance, with a will inside that charges forward, erratic and rejuvenated. Anorexic, because nourishment makes me grow; “and by what right can my growth be legitimised?” Drowned in phantom pain, in which some stranger passing by would stab me in the centre of my abdomen. I bid farewell to the world every five minutes, sometimes twice. Or occasionally thrice. Everything that couldn’t be accurately logged and recorded, all twenty inexplicable episodic symptoms striking my consciousness simultaneously at once. With countless attempts I was teaching myself to surrender, to yield; yet I rose again, and kneeled again—overdraft after overdraft, arriving before a dead end on repeat. “How could I possibly, be, living?”
“Is my pain God?” Penned Olga Tokarczuk.
I saw the Tsing Fung Street overpass clearly on the double-decker, which is the landscape I’m never tired of watching. (Don’t think about heights, nor falling.) “I’m not emotional, I’m in pain.” I felt the pain of existence, the myriad sentiments I’d caused along the way, that were just adding another layer on top of the pain, like a “mille-feuille of pain.” Just an endless self-negotiation and game of ping-pong, a tug-of-war with myself, as if I was preparing a national flag at a solemn conference, with a clean declaration document printed on paper, a pen, flashing lights for myself; followed by signing, implementing, and enacting, from now on to ever after.
My mother put away all my scissors and cutters after the eventful evening. Love takes many forms, and her way was just one of a million. It’s about sheathing sharp blades and hiding. “How can someone live in this vessel? I’m telling myself that I can, dear. I can.” That morning, on a whim, besides staring blankly at the ceiling with numbness, I picked up my Kaweco pen and listed the names of those who “don’t want to see me die.” Counting on my fingers for four rounds, there were as many as forty people. I told C, with tears streaming down my face, “Look, I have forty people.” She said, “Darling it’s going to be a very tight bar.” Instead of envisioning it as my own funeral, she encapsulated it in such a poignant image—that it would be a very crowded bar, perhaps so suffocating that the air would become stagnant, and everyone would feel overjoyed and overheated, as if running a fever. Ecstatic. Full of it. (Have you ever seen me drunk? I’d love to have your witness.)
One day in Wan Chai I was smoking by myself and J came to me for my lighter. She told me she visited Hong Kong three times in her life, and the scent was different each time. “The scent in the air…some qualities are fleeting.” The two of us, strangers, continued to converse for hours and inevitably touched upon the topic that was lamentably taboo, “South Korea took forty years. Much bloodshed…and you can do it in your homeland too, after all. Some day.” I sobbed and sobbed, but J didn’t shed tears when I was in her arms. Parting ways, I introduced myself, “I’m Clementine, originally named Hei-man.” She frowned, “Don’t call yourself Clementine, it’s a really sad name. You know the song, ‘Oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine...’ Your Chinese name sounds like ‘hope’ to me in Korean, ‘Hi-mang.’ You know what, I’m going to call you ‘Hope’...” She immediately saved my contact as “Hope” on her phone, adding that I can take her couch when I visit. I thanked her and answered, “Until next time.” If I ever say “next time” to you, it means I love you. It is proving that because of you, I still want a tomorrow.
I don’t pity my suffering. (My illness isn’t pitiable. The knot, origin, and recurrence are just the intertwined consequences of everything. They just bloom and bear fruit.) But suffering makes me empathise with others. I’ve collected everyone’s failures, triumphs, and glories. Reunited like a kaleidoscope—abundant, radiant, versatile, multifaceted, and complete. “Losing all hope is freedom.” Somehow, from the liberty that arose from reckoning “not every tomorrow is guaranteed,” I see a beam of light, not a thread, surrounding me like a hemispheric haze, exposing me.
Three: The wind whistles
S’s family doesn’t use the doorbell. They call out by whistling, a family of whistlers. Even though her father can’t whistle, he hums the tune of a whistle, singing it out for the family to open the door. “Hello?” If I came back and whistled, would you recognise it’s me? I heard the wind whistling in the summer, and I truly believed you were calling me, but perhaps it was an auditory hallucination. I once dialled someone because I wanted to hear their voice, but after a few “hellos,” I hung up and then stumbled about, confessing, “Why can’t your ‘the one’ be me?” On the other hand, I say to myself, “Recite after me—I don’t need this person who doesn’t need me. I can relinquish. I can.”
The bodies speak; intimacy speaks; the unspoken language speaks. The goodbye to my morbid form of limerence speaks too, in the loudest possible manner. Your fingertips on me were consistently warm, like cooled water, neither evaporating nor settling; it felt like you weren’t exerting force when you pressed on me. Your efforts paid on my flesh are so effortlessly subtle. (Every time after intimate moments, he would dampen a towel to wipe my neck, afraid that the spit left would cause rashes.) Unfortunately, in the end, I realised, my triggers aren’t my love. I can protect myself from what I want. Though I’ve never done so. I just thought I could.
Perhaps it was just a kind of addiction. Cigarettes burnt one after another, I swapped one form of addiction covering another. I strolled along the long streets of Happy Valley smoking in the dead of night, repeatedly realising that independence and loneliness manifest in the way I choose to corrupt myself. Transferring an addiction from one person to another. Finding someone alike to share the bed with. ‘Your heart feels like walking on a tightrope.’ The pulse was like pressing on a wiry string, with a slight tension in recoil; he gripped my wrist with three fingers, speaking thus.
Not in vain did I exhaust my strength catapulting the boomerang. Reckless at the start, now its spin is ceaseless. I bear the waxing and waning, the profit and loss. Like the moon. Like finance. Like Hong Kong. I don’t bet or gamble, except with the emotions I devote into places and individuals. All in, to sink or swim. When a gust of wind hits, a whistle-like sound. I would say, “Hello?” No one at the receiver, no answer at the door, no one on the road, no one knowing. I tread again in the realm of no one.
Four: Unscented tissue papers
“What does it mean for a relationship to ‘work out’?” Sally Rooney questions. I interpreted it as having no result is also an outcome. Love is something learnt. (Thank you for teaching me by holding my hands tight, like how you teach a child to write their name.) I cannot be with or by myself, but I have love, and am loved. I learn, practice, prime, and refine it repeatedly.
Olga Tokarczuk writes, “Eminet In Minimus. Maximus Ille Deus [In the smallest of things lies the power of the divine]”—love too, as though the most subtle and ancient microbe, lurking in the tiniest crevices, breeding within, cocooned, and being sacred. Love yourself, save yourself. How to love well? And what does it mean to have love proven working?
Y is physically sensitive and allergic to different sensual triggers, and is particularly reluctant to use scented tissue when she sneezes. I needed to learn how to treat Y well, so I’ve started carrying fragrance-free tissues with me, exclusively for her. And when Y passed through the market, she suddenly took my hand, saying, “Your hand is so soft and gentle.” We never know what our own hands are like. “You’re incredible. And I’m just a call away, sweetheart,” N always calls me sweetheart. The cuddles help, embraces are redemption. I recall the papaya fish soup I had at N’s place, the first time I had fish soup served in a liquor glass, a taste almost unforgettably nourishing.
I encountered W in Sai Ying Pun serendipitously. He said Indonesians will remember your kindness for a lifetime. In his presence, I felt aged (like the fifteen-year-old Marguerite Duras). He smokes cigarettes from his homeland, a kind of “working-class cigarette” blended with cloves, the specific tropical scent of spices entices me. Once he texted me, misspelling “your time” as “you’re time.” It was then, after such an epiphany that, I realised “I am time.” W mentioned that Jakarta is sinking, hence the country is relocating its capital to Nusantara. And I’m also the one who keeps sinking, it might be time to unveil my own migration blueprint.
T touched my face before the train station, her eyes swelled up, nose tingled. She said, “I love every bit and facet of you. High or low tides, I love you still.” She gave me a packet of sea salt–flavoured chocolate, mentioning how sweet things need a hint of salt for flavour. That might have justified why my tears must be shed; how bitterness gets to be garnished with a pint of salt.
Stranger O from Russia walked up to me suddenly in Tin Hau. He learnt I was severely ill that day, “Physical or mental?” I lied without any second thought, “Physical.” He shook my arm and held me tightly, yelling at me to “pull myself together.” “Everything will be alright.” When he hugged me in his arms, there was a scent of intoxication, a half-drunken aroma. The fragrance of his liquid bread evaporated from his body, like his own perfume. Fermented and evaporating, he carried an aroma that was rising and dispersing. “O, I’m sorry I lied. It’s mental.” My illness was also fermenting. I told him I wanted to die yesterday, and I’ve been ideating it many times. But, O, listen, I lived through it. And I want to keep living. I want to live, witness angels, and become an angel like you.
Nights ago, I heard thunderstorms in my room when I was speaking to H on the phone. I told him right away there were thunderstorms and lightning, followed by showers and downpours, but H, who lives miles away, didn’t sense it at all in Sai Wan Ho. The geographical distance created different atmospheric experiences (S and I did this scientific calculation once, the far-east end to the far-west node in Hong Kong shares a time difference of six seconds. How can I forget this?). I told him without a second thought, “Let’s listen to the thunderstorm together under the same shelter in the future.” Hearing thunderstorms together is indeed buoyant, and constitutes a form of love, doesn’t it.
I’m doused and drenched with love that extinguished my pain. They exemplify and epitomise how to excel in love. To love as such, and how not to. “Love is not omnipotent. It was until it wasn’t,” but it ought to be. Can I ever live and age? Will I ever grow into an age full of silver hair? Will I wrinkle like having train tracks on my forehead, so you can move a toy train on them back and forth?
An era weighs heavily. How can I write about myself? I cannot pen hopelessness, for it would be unjust. I am reluctant to endlessly discuss ailments, but alas, only illness allows me to converse. Yet with perspective and vision comes limitations, and I cannot be liberated from the self. I can (un)fortunately only be and become myself. “Understanding is merely a form of imagination,” Chung Ling-ling writes. I cherish my own capacity for imagination, as much as yours. This rendezvous empowers me to carry on with my manoeuvrability, arrive at my own soft landing, put my marginalia together. Make it well juiced and brewed. It is on time. The recovery comes on time. It has done its part in time, and so have I. Hearing hallucinatory voices within my head stunts and bewilders me, but the cicadas’ resonance that seeps through and springs from my window in the summertime might outdo and overshadow it after all, eventually.
It is time; shall we take off together? I think of the Soviet satellite Sputnik from the 1950s, which essentially means “travelling companion” in the language. Each of you, every moment of your trying repeatedly pulls me back from distant, chaotic, disorderly, weightless, ethereal, and distant places to the centre, back to the ground. I will turn on my flight mode mentally. Please fasten your seatbelt with me. I’m activating my SOP like how you asked me to, as a source and tactic of living salvation. Let us meander and glide through the orbits and trajectories. Let us listen to the thunder under the same roof.
My sputniks, shall we?
Five: Becoming you
Out of the blue, I recall Victoria Harbour and the Finley Road (芬梨道1) we once wandered, gazing upon its beauty at night. (A pear is meant to be enjoyed alone. Don’t split the pear. Don’t separate.) You, still present, are the greatest blessing.
If you love and appreciate someone, projecting your greatest hopes onto them, then please become your own reflection. Your triggers aren’t your love. What you project onto others is actually what you must accomplish in your lifetime. “Throughout your life, you’re only searching for one person.” And that person, no one can deny, can be yourself.
I confide in S, confessing that my writing is fragmented, scattered like pieces on the shattered floor. It’s due to my illness and my own rooted traits. S tells me, “If what you write is fragments, then make each piece sharp.” The mirror of perfection is clear and splendid, and you only see one version of yourself reflected within. But if you pick up a brick and hurl it at the mirror, it will shatter into discrete versions of yourself. This is the process of growth. I am finally able to bear witness.
If I suddenly become sentimental and affectionate, don’t be surprised. I simply wish to seize every tomorrow, to love what I love. I want to learn how to make soup for you, how to speak your languages, how to love you, and how to become you. I can’t wait for the next life. With a flick of my finger, I’ll do it in this life. The greatest courage is not enduring the pain of falling. But living. Only by living.
1. 芬梨 takes the pronunciation of Finley in Cantonese and literally means a fragrant pear, while the words also share the same pronunciation as 分離, which means “to separate,” or 分梨, to cut up and share a pear.
All images courtesy of Clementine Hei-man Cheung.
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