Never Trust This Person

I always feel a little different when I touchdown in Hong Kong. Firstly, I wax lyrical far too much when I’m in airports – it’s just one of those places (contrasting with old, creaky book stores and dead-letter departments) that spins, transient, ever-ephemeral: wilder still. I think I do most of my writing when I’m waiting at a plane gate, slipping my pen languidly over the pages of my writing pad. I never stay on the lines. And when they call for passenger boarding, I neatly close my pad, never to be seen again until a following flight. I might collect enough snippets to call it an ‘Anthology of a Bored Girl In Airport’. I know, I know: stop the presses.

Maybe I like it because it feels like I’m at a cusp of something. It sounds contrived, yes, and in my mind there’s always been a big difference the UK and Hong Kong. Not least the infrastructure, but the people I spend time with, the places I walk in my off-white flip-flops – the casual beaches, the searing hot pavement, the sudden burst of heavily-scented department store air-conditioning even with sand in my hair – the jokes we laugh at; the things we do. I think of the way I can raise my head into the night sky and not see stars, but pinpricks of light reverberating from skyscrapers. These are the stars of our very own. And the edges of the clouds glow in quiet embers, set on fire by the city’s stirrings.

Maybe if we asked someone, they would tell us what this all meant.

Good-bye, second year of my tumultuous law degree. I’ll never forget the impromptu tea parties and the tickle of grass against my cheek as we laid like kings on the fields. I will remember about the late-night-exam-induced aches in the nape of our necks – the strain of our back muscles – to the languid night strolling through the city, eating vanilla ice-cream as the world ran past us.

Onwards, Hong Kong! Home! The city breathes, moves, lives – and so do I, synchronised to the pulse of the traffic.

Thanks for the memories. See you next year. <3