Suicide Lane Cafe

I will always choose you.

Somewhere in one of the dusty bookcase of memories lies the image of the last time I saw you. There's a security guard who calls me "kid" and another who sees the colour of my passport and speaks to me in my native language. There's a Korean man, Incheon-bound, rummaging through his backpack and holding his boarding pass like a lifesaver. There's a red-eyed runny-nosed man who stands motionless. The only way I know he's alive is in the slow shuffles as the line inches forward. 

They're just extras, though. The spotlight is entirely on you. You, standing at the back behind rows and rows of tired passengers, behind the security cordon teary-eyed and one hand waving. 6'4, so your head sticks out. I don't need your height to see you, though. 

That was the last time I saw you. I went home, and five weeks later you broke up with me. I sat on my bed, clutching my phone and drinking half a bottle of gin. My fingers were numb from writing so many letters and smoking so many cigarettes. Those are not my last memories of you. 

Instead I see you rubbing sleep from your eyes in the morning before belly-flopping out the bed and towards the shower. I hear, from beneath layers of blankets, the coffee machine turn on. I feel the mattress sink as you poke at my cheek: "babe, it's time to get up." I smell the coffee you used to swear you'd never drink again after developing an addiction, but have gone back to like a baby nursing after the realities of working life forced you to forgo ideology for practicality. 

I see phone calls late into the night and the ringtone of FaceTime that always sends both of us springing for our phones. When I love you and I'll see you again soon, I promise were whispered like a prayer to a god neither of us believed in. A calendar on my phone, counting down to the days one of us can scrape up the thousands of dollars needed to see each other again. We envied normal couples, those who drove two hours for date nights and complained about it. "At least you don't have to fly thirteen thousand kilometers," we'd say. Thirteen thousand kilometers, eight thousand miles, fifteen hour flights. Numbers we lived our relationship by. 

I see a crowded train station, fumbling for your hand so I don't lose you in the crowd. You'd joke that I could never lose you -- you were too tall and too big for that, crowds parted before you and your resting bitch face -- and I'd laugh and say I was more afraid that you would forget about me. So I clung on to your hand and pressed my cheek to your chest, feeling the train sway and taking comfort from the knowledge you were right here, everything is okay, everything will be okay. 

There are paths we must walk, both of us. Yours is dark and lonely, decorated with the deep gloominess of depression and alcoholism. Road signs that say "I AM PERFECTLY FINE" and a persistent urge to run away from your problems. Mine is coloured red and green, traffic lights that switch between colours all too quickly or never at all. Impulse sitting like roadkill by the side, and a sole car veering recklessly, drunkenly, lurching from one emotion to another. If your sign screamed Denial, mine said Unstable. 

And yet. And yet. I would still choose you, every time. I have been choosing you everyday we met, since the first time you sent me that first text, far too stubborn and far too reckless to give up something that made me feel hope for the first time. I was so afraid of getting it wrong I never figured out what to do if I got it right, and in losing me I lost you. I chose you, again and again, and if, one day our roads intersect once more -- I will keep choosing you.