The fake blonde who doesn't love me is in my Jag again, searching for peace and composure in the Prada bag I had bought her recently. Her recurring mantras about getting another nose job, another liposuction, and shopping Fendi totes in Paris or Milan stings like Tiananmen uprisings.

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After recent deaths and debts in my family, the recovery encountered hurdles, and feels like another calamity, worse than Typhoon Haiyan's damage on my assets in the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. So my Guangzhou siren can wait. But soon, she is driving fuck-yous, bitch-slapping the night in Cantonese, gone operatic, hurling metaphors that make me scramble for my balls.

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But like always, her voice does it, passionate, clawed with fire that light up the city in me. So I start with her knees. Imagine we're alone on the Eiffel, I whisper in fake French, as though a great wall has crumbled, and I am now free to move deep into China to join other desperadoes gasping air, and drive Hong Kong up in glass and steel.

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I'm turning up the volume now. She giggles like Milan is wearing her high on heels, burning with surrender. The cross hanging around the rearview mirror claims a rhythm that swallows days and nights. It's the eternal prelude, tearing us into each other over and over again. We fog the city in glass, and reign on whatever that weather like storms leashed to inevitable cycles of destruction.

 

"Postcard for Hong Kong" first appeared in Local Nomad.