Sick Boy[s] Paddle Club↓

Fever of Love

Composite Moon 复合月亮

Translated by: Lincole Li

I didn’t sleep well. Slept past my morning lecture. When I woke I nearly thought I was back in last year’s dorm, but the bed across from mine was empty. My mind drifted inexplicably to my undergrad days, to that friend now living twelve time zones away. She was about the same height as me (but she lacked my deathly-pale complexion). Round-faced. Small freckles that grew along the center of her cheeks. Eyes that lit up whenever she spoke. She wasn’t the kind of girl favored by the “gods of beauty” in terms of traditional standards, but she didn’t care at all. What I never told her was this: when I fell in love with her, she wore red-rimmed glasses, the ends of her hair were highlighted with bright red dye, and she always wore midi dresses with skirts that flared out like blooming petals. A ball of fire, she was. Blazing, dazzling, and crazy. I was but a speck of dust that clung silently to the windowpane. I am struck again by my own mediocrity.

Winter of our junior year, we were cooped up in the late-night study room at Xinya studying for finals. It was deep into the night; we were the only ones left. You said you felt nauseous and suggested that, since the exam was only nine hours away, we might as well just pull an all-nighter. But it was so cold in that room. Financial Reporting II felt impossibly, damnably difficult then. I couldn’t process whatever I was studying, and picked at the skin on my fingertips till the wound looked pale; blood speckled within, but the chill seemed to startle them back into the skin. They settled into mute, dark red spots. It seemed as if I was incapable of bleeding naturally. Compared to your innate talent, I was an animal with an unevolved brain. Stubborn. Dimwitted. Yet I still awkwardly wear my heart on my sleeve, nervously showing you my insides, endlessly shivering in the silence. But you never spoke of those things. You talked about our dreams, our futures, and most importantly, how happy our lives were going to be. Stop studying, you said, no more studying. We should go outside, walk into the night, walk past stairs, gardens, and benches, to steal a trolley no one uses from the old building. We’ll stand on it hand-in-hand like two plain, undecorated packages, then we’ll scoot across the bright yellow rooftop of the Mong Man Wai Building and go to the top of the mountain surrounded by cold air, and we’ll speed down the mountain past trees and bushes. We should stop at some point and roll around on a field of grass, our clumsy fingers crossing each other’s spines – even though our hair is wet and our cheeks hot, our laughs scattered, even though dew has condensed on our entire bodies, we don’t feel the cold. We should hug, like how Aristophanes described love: two broken halves clinging together to form a small sphere. We would tumble and tumble, dry the moisture on our bodies with the dirt and gravel they tumble across. Tumble until we reach that terrace where heaven and humanity become one – there’s an oval lake that lies outside the cliff and atop the altar. The water and sky merge, everything seems boundless yet only big enough to hold our tightly held hands and knuckles at the same time. We should keep standing there until the air chills and a red sun bursts out from the space between water and sky. Or we should just gaze at each other in the humid yet dazzling light of dawn, then we’ll hold our breaths and jump. You said we should dance. Come dance! I looked at you and said you were crazy. What I really wanted to say was: I’m in love with you. But I didn’t really know what love was, nor how to love, so I couldn’t tell if it was really love or if it was just some type of fever that followed hysteria. I felt like Vanessa Chantal Paradis—because I hadn’t gone mad myself, I madly viewed “madmen” as the only real humans. Because they speak with such madness, they seek salvation with such madness, and they long for everything with such madness. They have a talent for it. Only when I was with them did I feel truly alive.

But she is gone now. I’d always known she was out of my reach—she had excellent grades, made the Dean’s List, and successfully escaped accounting, which we both loathed, and transferred to data science, which she loved. She’s already planted herself in a soil I’d never seen. She’s never changed, blazing and soaring, always chasing her dreams. And what of me? After class I stand outside the same Business Building, the half-melted ice in my Americano dazedly swaying like cloudy brain plasma. The street lights are ghastly white, yet the crowds of people outside are still boisterous. Only the mountain trails far away are quiet, slipping into a stretch of silent deep green. Right before me, they are partitioned off by some railings, making them feel impossibly far away. They look like the complicated maze trails in plastic balls that kids played with in the early 2000s: a wound sliced off from the real world. Two girls are smoking next to a bright orange trash can. The wind blows across their highlighted hair, across their laughs, and the rings of smoke that dissipated along with their laughs. I hear them talking about their dreams, their futures, and how happy their lives would be. I remember the time I first read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. I didn’t understand shit at the time, but I was intensely opinionated; I didn’t grasp the Dionysian impulse or the Apollonian spirit, nor did I grasp any symbolic meanings. I just thought humans were humans. So I detested Mizoguchi’s darkness and cowardice. Now that I think about it, I’m actually a Mizoguchi in a sense, a more mellow Mizoguchi, a more “positive” Mizoguchi. In other words, a more cowardly Mizoguchi. 

I burned all my dreams inside of a dream. Now, when I open my eyes, I am left with nothing but the instinct of a dog: I have to stay alive.

Composite Moon

Researcher in Finance. Probably already a Paranoid Android when it comes to academia and writing! …Out to take people apart, see what's inside, then make up a story and piece them back together. Generally writes whatever comes in dreams.