I found this in a notebook at the bar of Fuel Espresso.
“Well, the man honestly didn’t know what to think, he’d only just begun to understand what he was feeling. He did have a lot of questions though. (Later). And he did feel more comfortable writing about it all in third person as he sat at the bar of the busiest café in the mall he passed through each day on his way to work. The International Finance Centre. The man knew nothing about Finance. He was extremely well in fact. If well could be extreme. What had he done that day? He should write it down. He had already had three soy milks over the course of the day. It was now 4:00PM. What did he feel? First panic, then immense satisfaction, then warmth, then elation, followed by fear of rejection and then finally some elements of self-criticism. Get a hold of yourself, the inner critic said. The cycle repeated. The soy milk hadn’t helped. It wasn’t meant to. It was just a way to ensure you got at least 60 grams of protein in your daily intake. Anyway, he had char siu over rice for lunch under the highway (one soy milk in) and that’s when he admitted to himself he was probably in love. He took himself out for char siu just for that. It was the tenderness of the pork and the tenderness of his own feelings that somehow made it seem like the right thing to do. Love. He looked his feelings up. This thing releases what CNN called a ‘fascinating’ mixture of chemicals in the brain. People die of lovesickness the article said, or heartbreak, which was basically depression-induced coronary failure, which was surely the outcome our man here was dreading as he existed in two places at once, i.e., sweat-soaked and hunched over his plate at the char siu establishment (where the only two servers, cackling, were definitely gay and the fact that the establishment’s name translated to ‘The Good Sisters’ in English seemed like some washed-up musical theatre director’s idea of a joke) and sitting at this café which smelled of money writing in his notebook as if he were on holiday. How weird to exist in two places at once, he thought. His feelings did not subside. He just felt them in two places, twice over. It was horrible. It was July. Why did love always come in the summertime? He’d gotten absolutely no work done that day because of it and also because his laptop was being repaired. Love would be the kind of thing you’d open a novel with, he thought. The waiter brought over the single espresso. The man wondered what effect it would have on his cycle. Would it speed up the passage of emotions? Intensify them? He hoped nothing would happen. He was addicted to caffeine. Soy milk contained zero grams of caffeine. He watched the people in the café for a while. He was expecting nobody. Such was the nature of his life right now, not expecting anybody, which is why he was so caught off guard by the whole thing in the first place.”