Sorry for the long delay: had to program an oscilloscope, am now preparing for lab presentation and radio design. Wheee. I am, irrationally, rather in love with this Utada Hikaru song, despite not understanding most of it. So much so that I forgot to write in present tense as usual. Oh, buggerit. The song does sound lovely on piano. And about yao char kwai (fried dough sticks) I don't know if this is available on Mars, but it is in Hong Kong, I think - it definitely is in Malaysia - and it is GOOD.


Boy Alone :: 2 First Love

She changed her name, cut her hair, dyed it black. Wore her coat a different colour, took off her sunglasses and threw them into the sea as she drove over the bridges, that day. When he went away she wanted to go away as well, only she knew that his death was temporary. But even then, she wanted to die, too. Temporarily.

So she went away, too, and she told herself, I'm becoming someone else. Just for a while. Because while he's away from me, he's not being himself, either. Or even if he is - he's a different person. I can't be Julia without him. So I'll be someone else. I'll call myself a lot of names, move around. One day he'll find me, and I'll be Julia again.

She didn't like to go out, now. When it was raining she would put on a waterproof coat and walk in the streets because then it was unlikely that someone would look at her - people don't look at each other, when it's raining - and it was safer than walking at night. When she needed food, money, things from outside, the girl ran errands for her. The girl was quiet and never asked questions; friend of a friend, small-sized and frail-boned. She called the girl Mei. Xiao Mei. Little sister. She'd always wanted a little sister. Someone to look after.

It was raining now and she wanted to go out, but it was getting dark and she didn't like the idea of Mei sitting in the house alone after dark. In the streets outside the lamplights were coming on and the hawker stalls along the main street, at the end of the road, were filling up with people willing to huddle underneath the colourful red-blue-white umbrellas and wait for a sizzling hot plate of fried noodles, a bowl of wan-tan-mee, an oil-crispy pair of yao char kwai. She wanted to go out, get something hot for Mei when the girl came back. There was a great guilt on her, now; she knew why Mei was late, and she knew that if it was not for her, Mei would be back by now, and they would both go out to stand beneath the hawkers' colourful umbrellas waiting for their take-away, smiling at vaguely familiar neighbours' faces peeking out from underneath the other umbrellas.

Umbrella.

There was one, now, moving down the street. Mei hadn't gone out with an umbrella, and there was also the bulkier shape of someone else there, someone bigger and broader but still tall and slim. Spike-shaped. Everything, if she was in the mood, seemed Spike-shaped, Spike-scented, Spike-touched - the people, the cigarettes, the streets, the flowers. A boy, tall and slim, that's who it is, she said to herself. You had your boy; Mei has hers. But you sent her to speak to that boy - is that him, then? Is that why he brings back these memories of Spike?

She ran, then; ran to the door of the apartment, stopped there, her hand on the door. There are two boys, she said to herself. Leaning against the wood of the door, she said their names, familiar names strange now on her tongue because she had not called them for so long. Shin. Lin. Shin. Lin. Shin would help her. He had sworn it. She'd seen the light in his eyes, felt his almost filial love for her in the last hug he had thrown around her arms, seen his grief in his downcast eyes when she had told him she was leaving and he had to stay. And he had respected Spike, who probably would not remember him, now; Spike, who had loved the other boy, Lin, perhaps as much as she had loved her little Shin.

Shin. Lin.

She wanted it to be Shin, who was there. It probably was. Shin would want to see her again, would like to know that she was all right. He would know that she, too, wanted to see him again.

The main door opened, creaking so badly she could hear it right through the front door of the apartment. Footsteps, then, up the stairwell. She knew that if she guessed wrongly, she would have to find another way out of the building, and after that, another way out of the country, perhaps off the planet itself. But she didn't want to move. The world, she thought, doesn't revolve around you. Maybe Mei does have a boy, and he's a gentleman who doesn't want his girl to walk home alone.

"You should get dry, quickly."

"I'm fine. Thanks. You didn't have to walk so far with me."

"It is nothing."

"You can come up, if you want."

"Do you want me to?"

"Do you want to?"

She prayed so hard and long that the voice she heard was his voice, that Shin had just become a little stiff, a little more polite in his way of speaking. In the silence that followed, she knew it could not be Shin, that Shin would never speak to an even vaguely attractive girl so awkwardly. Shin always knew what to say, and with him there were no silences of this sort. But she felt, oddly, even more disappointed on Mei's behalf. You want him to come up, she said to Mei, trying to let the words reach through the wood of the door, down the single flight of stairs, mouth moving without sound; you'd like him to. Tell him. Forget that he will probably try to kill me if he knows who I am. If you think that much of him - tell him.

But Mei, she forgets, is almost as awkward as Lin, and is only made bold by the fact that he has walked this far with her.

"If you don't come up, where are you going to go?"

"I will go - home."

"So would you rather go home, than come up?"

"I think I will come up."

She could not move away from the door, because she thought there was no need to. She had forgotten her own fear, her own connection to Lin; she wanted Lin to connect, now, to Mei. Because it is evident that Mei wants this connection, and it is evident that Lin has nothing against it, except that he is totally unaware of what to do. Perhaps he is even aware of what it is. Perhaps he is not even capable of it. She wants to run Vicious's katana through the man's thin body, since he is the only person she can think of to blame for this; she cannot blame Spike.

I should blame Spike, she thought. When he went away, he hadn't finished teaching Lin, yet. It was like a tug-of-war with Spike on one end and the Red Dragon on the other, and Spike, when he went away, let go. I went away and that didn't hurt Shin because Shin, bless him, Shin could take care of himself. Shin knew his own heart. But Lin is different from his brother, and Lin perhaps needed a little more guidance and perhaps a little more care, and Spike wasn't there to give it. So why blame Spike? If you knew it, and you didn't tell Spike to stay a little longer, why blame Spike?

She cried into the door, and her tears flowed without sound. But there were footsteps now, closer and closer, and she pulled away, ready to run, out of the window, down the fire escape, into the rain; she was not sure now if she was running from the death that he had been ordered to bring upon her, or the mistake that she let Spike make. A terrible mistake to make, a beautiful boy with green eyes and a smile that the world will probably never see again, except as a mirror image in the teeth of his twin. Footsteps stopping, outside the door.

"Are you coming in, then?"

Pause.

"I think I'll go home, now."

The air seemed silent now, peaceful. She lifted her head. In the door there was a peep-hole the size of a thimble, and she put her eye to it.

Watched as Mei leaned up to drop a kiss on the boy's white cheek.

"Thank you," he said. His hair was wet and a few straggly locks flopped down over his forehead. Behind the door, she took her face away from the peep-hole and walked away, into her room, where she shut the door. The front door did not open until five minutes later.

"He wasn't there today," Mei said.

"That's all right. It'll take him time to scan everything."

Mei did not ask her what it was that she wanted Shin to look for. Instead, the girl turned on the radio, flipped through a few channels, and then turned it off.

"Isn't there anything worth listening to, then?"

"No," Mei said, "just a bunch of soppy love songs."

But in the morning, when the woman who was living in place of Julia woke up, she heard Mei singing, soft in between the sound of doors closing and the taps running and the kettle boiling, and there were words that made her feel a premature, undefinable sense of regret for something that had not yet happened:

You will always be inside my heart Itsumo anata dake no basho ga aru kara I hope that I have a place in your heart too...


*ahem* That wasn't supposed to happen, and I have to remember to hide my obsession with Jay Chou songs, etc, from my boyfriend, who will doubtless crow with triumph at having inducted me into the Soppy Love Songs mentality. The next song I quote will have to be from The Verve (who played some good shiznit) or Moby (blues, man. blues). To preserve my hide. And pride.