Cause I Like You

*

The sound of your giggles reminds Chan of a brook flowing on a pebbled path. Playful and chiming clear in the night wind.

'I'm sorry. I wasn't expecting it to go this way.'

Your voice floats free here, unbounded and unrestrained. It makes him smile as he locks his fingers around your palm, knees giving in, caught between forces of gravity bringing him down and you pulling him up the softly rising slope, nails soiled and his other palm coming out full of grassroots he dug into the slanting earth to climb up.

He envies your energy and the untroubled sweet smile that rests on your lips. Whatever you said next, he fails to make out, exultant with the night air fluttering loud in his ears up at this height. It takes his gaze racing back down the hill from where you both made your way to the dusty road –an endless fine streak reflecting a golden patch under the chrome of the solitary burning sodium lamp. It amazes him how he was standing below it just moments earlier and there was no reminiscent of it happening except in the memory in his head.

'It's alright.', he says basking in the way the clean outskirts make his voice sound so good.

There's something about this night that settles inside him as if he was waiting to live too much and too little all at once. Something which hadn't happened yet but he knew was coming. It would lift him up in waves and his feet would leave the Earth. In a way it makes him feel simple like his brain wasn't submerged and locked in a bog.

It's unreal how distant he feels from the city, completely out of its gravity. The very real and very present metropolis visibly glittering a few kilometres away under the same sky, thriving under a weight, a blanket so heavy dragged around by lifeless arms of everyday life.

The city was pulsi­­­ng. Waiting for him. To reach his arms out and make contact with a breathing reality with his fingers' softest touch and tremendous forces would snatch his being, into the pulling snares of city lights with no point of return.

He feels your hand squeeze his and he's glad you both got lost tonight.

  ~

If someone were to ask Chan when his story began, he would tell them it began in a second-hand book street market fifteen years ago amidst the growing din of bargaining locals and loud shouts of hawkers spreading book collections on worn-out plastic sheets. Books of all sizes, in all languages he didn't know, covers of every colour gleaming vibrant in his eyes under the blinding halogen lamps. Chan burnt his hair while slipping under a low-hanging hot halogen rod, leaving his mother's side to enter a small tented stall. A pale blue book someone had just put back was sticking out of books lined together and neatly recessed in the bookshelf.

He tiptoed, pulling the book with all the might his tiny arms could muster, and caught the whole shelf in the momentum. The world tilted with him as he fell.

In the seconds that dilated during the fall, his eyes locked on the only stationary object in his hand–the most fascinating read he has to date –'The Earth and Space.'

  ~

'Mmm, this won't do. I have to put a mountain between us.'

A tug on his wrist stirs Chan and the moon shifts in her place, taken aback by the sudden mortal intervention in their conversation.

It takes a few moments for the celestial to catch up with him walking, easing into a lagging pace. But she's a little distant now.

He cannot find it in himself to look back down, tethered to his oldest companion in her faint waning crescent glow. If he looks away now, it won't feel the same when he looks back again. So he gazes on, feeling the familiarity of his tongue pasted against the roof of his mouth, skin that stretches taut along his dry throat and he wants to strain it more, tilt his head further and further back to behold the sky. He's done it so many times but tonight he will bid the moon adieu a little earlier so he keeps his head thrown back, desiring it all for as long as he is allowed today.