Ex and the city

For four consecutive nights I couldn’t sleep. I had no idea what was wrong with me. I just had a birthday and submitted to the fact that I was getting older and didn’t need sleep anymore. But I knew there was something more keeping me awake and that something lingered on the mind until the sun cracked. By day five I was mentally and physically exhausted. I knew it wasn’t the usual suspects of stress or the like. I knew something was about to happen. It was just a matter of when.

Then on day six it came. An email from my old flame arrived in my inbox. “Maybe a coffee sometime? Entirely up to you. Dx” I haven’t seen Dick for years, barely since we broke up. New lows of heartbreak were reached with this guy. I monitored myself as I read through his email: My breathing was steady, heart rate was fine, I’m not twitching, I might just be over him.

“My boss fired me… I’m going to London,” his email continued. Even though I hadn’t seen him, heard from him, or randomly bumped into him on the dance floor in all this time, I had the comfort of knowing he was still around somewhere. But now he was leaving Hong Kong. And this was our goodbye coffee. The end of an era. “4pm” I replied to his invite.

Without even a check in the mirror, I dashed out the door to meet him. In the elevator I thought, this is what I always used to do. I ran to him, it was never the other way around. I took my pulse to measure my excitement and nervousness. Normal. I started to worry over the fact that I was feeling absolutely nothing. Unlike before.

A month after our breakup I barely ate anything but miyoga. Miyoga is a winter vegetable popular with Japanese housewives who administered this astringent-tasting bud to forget their troubles. I ate it with every meal and got a mild buzz when overdosing. I would then cut my antidepressant with alcohol in the evenings and do it all over again. It was good to remind myself of these things, I thought as I walked to meet him. I was such a mess over him that my friends would scrap me off the floor and throw me on a jet plane whenever Friday rolled around so I could get excited about life again.

I came out of my funk and took away that in Hong Kong, nothing is forever. There were examples everywhere: restaurants/ relationships would open and close in short cycles; great friendships would form and then one party moved away; people were disposable. I became cynical, worst I was a party of one and jaded. It took two years for me to stopped looking at the world with dirt-coloured lenses.

I saw Dick from a block away. He towered above everyone on the street. When we embraced, I remembered how good it was to hug him. His all-enveloping arms felt like a fit. Shit.

Inside The Pawn, loaded with double espressos, we were formal with one another. Switching to gin improved the situation. Seven sips in we’re laughing at his receding hairline and how little sleep I needed as I aged. I told him was thinking of moving house, and he asked if I still lived in the same place, the same building we shared together. “My favourite crazy Hong Kong story I tell people was how you moved into my apartment when you got a hold of my keys,” he said. “You mean I wasn’t supposed to?” I thought to myself. Even though none of this mattered anymore, and as we were discovering our new level of comfort as exes, I couldn’t get myself to ask if me moving to his place was what broke us up.

We kept to nonchallenging topics such as happenings with old friends, family, work and currency trading, but never spoke of our current dating situation. We were happy for eachother’s successes and discussed the future. It was such a miracle that we could get right back into it, as if no time had passed. But time had to past to get us into this place --friendship. “When are you moving to London?” I asked. “Next week, but I’m coming back,” he said. “I’m not leaving Asia. You can’t dispose of me so easily.”