Rivener
Make or break the distance
“You okay, Vince?” I asked. You puked into your spare shopping bag. I had to stop you from hurling all over the ferry deck. Beige and yellow swirled around the 7/11 logo as I tied the knot.
“Yeah,” you wiped your mouth with the back of your hand, “typhoon season.”
That night, the water slashed the sides below the bottom deck, and the gusts pierced our skin with the cold that could never ease the humidity. The water was an enormous chest, rising and falling with every laboured breath.
“Was something wrong with the hotpot? I don’t remember you feeling motion sick before,” I said.
You just smiled as you plucked a cigarette out of a packet. Your teeth glinted in yellow against the orange end. It had only been six months since things took a turn for the better. Despite your red eyes and sunken cheeks, you looked like the luckiest man in the whole continent.
“What is it? Do I still have shit on my face?”
“Nope. But you have some black bean in your teeth,” I lied. I tried to hold in my laugh as you held up your phone like a mirror, prodding around your mouth with a loose toothpick from your pocket and muttering ‘Where’. I was glad that we had known each other then.
The central island was drawing closer. Kowloon retreated. The second-tallest skyscraper on that side was the brightest pillar. Its array of window lights formed the outline of Big Ben, and then it gave way to a Happy New Year message in English and Cantonese. We always found that quite gimmicky, especially in October. Piers sprouted out along the coastline, roots that sent away and welcomed the Oriental Pearl and the disco ferries. I almost hosted your engagement party in one of those. But I wanted to do it more to piss off Mary. When she broke off the engagement, you painted those ferries over and over. Neon lights cascaded as if the words on the ads merged with the tides, bursts of movement in people dancing next to the windows. Yet you speared each of them with grey and black gaps. Hollow ghosts that invaded the hulls, as uncanny as the oblivious passengers that you constructed. None of the characters looked like Mary.
Even though my admiration for your paintings had always been undeniable, I could only second-guess loose fragments of meaning from the unforgiving borderlines surrounding each brushstroke. No matter how many critics and tourists crowded around your work, the gaping slits of monochrome on each canvas could never be sutured by their praise.
The IFC tower stood affront with an authority of a hundred and fifteen floors. Only three floors shorter than the ICC tower back in Kowloon. Still, I craned my neck to look at it without fail.
“Did you have the auction a week ago?” I asked. Young men in neon green jackets stood on the pier, signalling towards themselves like they were guiding a driver to reverse.
“Yep.”
“How was it?”
“Alright. There was a funny buyer, though. British guy. He kept saying my painting was a Banksy copycat! I could hardly hold in a laugh.”
“Yeah, what would these serious connoisseurs think if they saw you crack a smile, huh?”
“Nah, they were shameless. First time that the room had probably heard any laughter at all. I swear the auctioneer snorted too! Got everyone riled up and the poor guy just sat there, confused as hell.”
I might have laughed too loudly in that moment. People turned around with their frowns of indifference. I didn’t care. If I could have made you smile one more time, shame be damned.
“Well, try to take a break this time. After your hiatus, I’d better be the first to see your next magnum opus!”
“Vivian.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s my last one.”
The ferry steadied as the gangway door clunked and thudded onto the pier. People got up to disembark. We didn’t dare move from our seats. Blinding white floodlights made the locks of your hair turn from ink to oak.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m done.”
“But, you-“
“I know I’m supposed to be at the height of it all. Pushing through it all like my life depends on it. But I’m done.”
“Then why?”
You kept looking forward, fixated on a horizon of vendors and bus stops ahead.
“I’m moving away. The flight’s tomorrow.”
If I hadn’t said anything about it, would you have just left without a word? As each manic runner rushed past us on the pier, I kept replaying our conversations from the past week, past month, past year. Grasping onto every morsel of clues that might have pointed the blame at me. Did I say something wrong? Was I not there for you?
“It’s nothing personal,” you muttered into the wind as the cigarette ash sputtered against the tip of your shoe.
“Well, what is it then? You have to see that this is coming out of left field.”
“This has been on my mind for the past six months.”
“I would probably know more about it if you didn’t just bottle everything up.”
“How would I tell yo-“
“Just be honest!”
A shrill sound came out and became my voice. It was a child’s cry, hoarse and pitiful. Couples cocooning on benches peeked at us. One woman rolled her eyes while squeezing onto her boyfriend’s arm tighter, a smirk more prideful than a deity.
We were a spectacle.
I knew better than to feel shame. In every performance, my face and my body weren’t mine. They belonged to the dance. Every joint and bone had to mould to someone else’s vision, no matter how much pain I was in or how much sweat infused into the makeup. You were the one person who taught me how to move for myself, how to speak for myself. You used to listen to my words as if I had the answer to every question. Every fleeting thought was held in the palms of your mind.
So why did you make me feel so lost in that moment? I looked away from your dumbfounded face.
“Viv.”
“What?” I couldn’t give in. Not this time.
“If you want me to explain, won’t you at least look at me for a second?”
I turned to face you, but my gaze was stuck to your shoes. The sides of your soles were peeling apart.
“Do you remember Nathan?” you asked.
“Your brother? Did he reply?”
“Yeah,” you laughed like the worst of everything had finally passed, “he did. After my dad moved out, I thought I’d never see him again. Sometimes my mum would say I was the best between the two of us — the son who stayed with his family through it all. You know, I used to believe that. Really believed it.”
“You were just a kid. Everyone starts off taking anything their parents say as gospel.”
“No. It was more so because I thought back to every day I grew up with him. If he was supposed to be my twin, my blood, then why did he leave me? I guess it was easier to be pissed at him than miss him.”
“And now-“
Screeching from a microphone reverberated as a busker set up her kit. Crowds of tipsy young teenage boys, still in their school uniforms, began to swarm towards her. I winced as I tried to keep up with you as they ran between us. You looked ahead, uninterested in the commotion, and popped a mint in your mouth like how we used to catch popcorn. After I just missed an elbow to my face, I took your arm as I leaned forward.
“Don’t go running off without me, Vince!”
Your hand went for mine as usual. Magnets. Inevitable. At least there was that. Right?
“Then keep up with me!”
After we walked away from the bustle, I repeated, “So what about now?”
“About Nathan?”
“Of course.”
“I just think that maybe this means that my parents’ divorce didn’t affect us. I think I’m ready to hear him out if he wants to talk.”
“But you don’t want to just talk. You want to move there and stay with him…”
“What if I could have the life I wanted there?”
I hesitated, “Don’t you have that here?”
With me? Maybe I should have said this. Because nothing could have prepared me for when you said-
“No. There’s always been something — I don’t know — missing. A gap that’s only grown bigger every time I have to show up at two houses. I have to hold it together, but I’ve gotten tired of doing it alone.”
Doing it alone?
The pit of my stomach sank as I paused in my tracks and let go of your hand. Stench from the lineups of garbage and urine flooded my nose as we reached Lan Kwai Fong. That street sign with the sticker in the corner. That’s where I held you for the first time after you told me about Nathan leaving. Downpours of salty tears mixed with beer bile as you barely formed sentences. I carried you home and stayed with you until I began to smell like guts. I thought that this was the truth that you trusted me to carry. Turned out it was only a glimpse into a whole different side that I could never reach.
You kept walking up the hill for a few seconds and then finally turned around. Even though we were only a few feet away, your mind was miles away into the night sky.
“Aren’t you coming? I’m starving.”
My jaw locked my words shut as I put on my best half-smile for you. I almost stumbled, despite this pathway being so familiar to me. You laughed and walked in before I could reach the door. How much of you did I not know?
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Plates and pints came to the table and left just as quickly. Inhaling it all was better than trying to pierce the silence. Off-tune karaoke drowned out every question that was pounding my ears, praying for your reassurance like a promise I took for granted until now.
I thought back to the day that we met. I arranged my choreography at the last minute, naively assuming that my dance wouldn’t need to be studied for more than an hour. But you were so emphatic in getting the right composition and movement that my ankles and spine were almost torn to shreds from dancing half a Sunday away. What a madman, I thought. Pretentious one too. Until I saw the painting in the pop-up exhibition in TST. Then everything clicked all at once. Every slight adjustment I made in my choreography, you were steadfast in capturing them on canvas. These vignettes of watercolour held your observations as if each glide and pivot was a fickle constellation caught on a telescope. Haunting grey chasms surrounded my vicarious poses. Gaping witnesses in place of my parents. Their absence felt so visceral the more I stared at your painting. The ghosts of them were watching me fight to fill the space around me. To prove that I could choose how I existed.
Honestly, it was an out-of-body experience that I wouldn’t have trusted anyone else to orchestrate.
You can see me.
You became my ‘someone’. The greatest friend I could dream of. If we had more years together, would it still feel like I haven’t loved you long enough to let you go?
And for the longest time, it felt that way. But that night, you showed me how it had to end.
“Vince.”
Don’t leave. “Can I be honest with you?”
You looked so alive. “Of course, what is it?”
Are you willing to lose me? Just like that?
“You can just visit him, you know?”
“I’m aware. But I’m still moving there.”
“Of course. But-“
“I won’t change my mind. Please don’t make this any harder.”
I nearly tipped over my glass, “What? Am I making this harder for you?”
You got up from the table to pay. Not even a flicker in your eyes. It would have been better if you were annoyed with me. Some sick part of me wanted to see that you were hurt. That I would matter enough to you to still strike a nerve. I drank the rest of my beer, and it tasted like ash.
As we left the restaurant, you held my coat out to me. I almost left it behind as I tried to rush ahead. Our hands crossed paths as I took it. Warmth from our fingertips interlaced, I wanted those seconds to linger. Maybe you wanted that too.
The ferry ride back was a fever dream. A flurry of conversations burst to life from one end of the deck to the other. Burnt-out salarymen sang pop songs off-key without a care in the world. Money would never buy this happiness. Yet in all of this, the empty seat between us was an endless gorge. I imagined that some stranger would have seen this, not knowing anything that happened before this moment. They probably thought that we never shared a single secret, we never cried together or laughed until our stomachs ached. They wouldn’t have known that I was replaying every word you said up until that ferry ride, so that I could keep the memory of your voice for a little longer. A stranger would have looked at this and thought I never loved you.
Your bus was a few minutes away. It felt wrong to leave you there, so I waited with you. I’d wait for you.
“You’re making this harder for me,” you muttered.
I prepared for the worst.
“Because leaving here means leaving everything behind. And when you are everything-“
You hesitated and closed your eyes.
“Viv, you are everything in the world that I hold onto for dear life. My art doesn’t mean anything if you’re not there to see it all,” your voice wavered, “But I can’t lose Nathan either. Not when I’m so close to having him again.”
And that’s when I knew that you had to make the right choice. In losing us, you were making amends with a loss that never stopped haunting you. And I had to keep moving forward to find the version of me that I could accept. Just without you here.
The bus slowed to a stop in front of us. I held you tighter and wiped the tears from my cheeks before letting you go.
“I hope you have a safe flight. Give Nathan all my love.”
