on-going moments

The urgency of travel comes from the failure to stay. When activities have (slowly) become inactivities, the resistence lies in perpetual departures. You carefully craft that very constant of commotions by nurturing the readiness of leaving. “You are the absent one.” someone told you one day. Your gaze fixated on a fleeing focal point, looking (hoping) for a grounding reply. You grant yourself the silence, leaving no traces to prove that you have already left.

First published on HKBU: Agora. 

Pet Sounds

The sound of you closing your door stealthily. The sound of your heels pressing on the woollen carpet. The sound of you dabbing eau de toilette on your wrists. The sound of you biting relentlessly on the eraser head. The sound of you typing your new address. The sound of you drawing a non-existent emoji on the back of a recipe, marked with a coffee stain. The sound when the arm of our turntable retracts itself automatically after finished playing the last song. The sound of epiphany as I heard the faint sound of dust falling on the ground.

As Autonous turned into a bird, you stood there and laughed. Toying on the slight difference of “Jing” in the pronunciation of “應聲” in Cantonese, you mispronounced “Jing1” instead of “Jing3” as expected. It somehow becomes a command to answer the sounds. Enchanted, I know I need to make a sound now. With a split second of wavering belief, the sound we uttered turned into a question. Should we answer the sound? Chuckles and ec—ec—ec—cho—oo—oes.

These are the sounds I ‘sampled’: https://goo.gl/f5mTP9

First published on HKBU: Agora