Chainsmoking Your Love

It's getting harder to breathe.

He's little more than a shadow.

Inhabiting the spaces between spaces. Gripping the edge of existence by the skin of his teeth. Precisely the way he likes it.

Spectre. Ghost. Nebulous.

He exists in the paper thin space in the milky corner of peoples eyes. Never settling still. Never quite allowing anyone a full glimpse, not for long. Not until he allows them to.

He keeps to the edges of this huge city. Down by the seedy bars and the local markets and in between the cracks in buildings. The buzzing maze of Mongkok and it's perpetual rain-shimmered streets.

Too loud. Too much. Chatter and heaving Cantopop and whiny mopeds crunching on his nervous system. Easy for a man like him to lose himself in this narrow warren of chaos.

The air is swamp hot. His collar sticks to his neck. Hair damp and black along his temples.

Muggy from recent rain. The air is packed with life; teeming and clouded with throat tickling spices from the food stalls, pungent and swirled with the spewing of bitter smoky engines. It all burns bright between the sprawling concrete buildings.

Where he stands he's ducked out of the last of the tropical rain that drips down the uneven gutters and roof tiles from above. Pattering unsteadily and splashing off his leather clad shoulders.

He's nursing an icy San Miguel tucked well out of plain sight. Concealed by the ramble of shabby food stalls selling curried fish eggs, snake soup and fermenting tofu.

Twitching eels and dead fish sit stinking in tubs of muddy water all around the elderly stooped vendor right in front of him. The sizzle of frying fish skin and sweet crab cloaked in spices on a searing wok, chokes the air. All punching chilli heat burning the back of his throat, mixed with his beer, and the overwhelming stench of wet gritty decay from the road.

The beer is brutally cold and condensation drips numb on his hands. The bar that's masking him is little more than a hatch in the wall. Filthy and cheap and it stinks of stale sweat. The grunting male patrons sit on cracking red plastic chairs and ignore him to play mahjong.

As far as they're concerned he's just another pale new face in an endless soup of tourists- they blindly assume he's just drinking in the noise and neon heat of their home city.

Only he's not here for pleasantries.

His eye is on the wall of buildings before him. Spread clunky and shambled opposite the street. He swigs back another hoppy mouthful. His sight is locked on one particular doorway.

One that's peeling with mucky pink paint and gaudy red bulbs. Across the street. Bathing the cupping mouth of the doorway in strawberry red and cotton candy pink.

The painted female silhouettes on the walls indicate the good time to be had inside. The giant arrow glowing, beaming above the door, goading people inside for lap dances. Promises the whump of bassy club music and gorgeous glitter covered girls twirling around poles.