Sai Ying Pun, 6:33PM – Balmy.

Entry 78

You can walk a good loop from the café called Elephant Grounds on Hollywood Road, past the freelancers and their dogs, down to Queens Road Central, past the grannies and their trolleys, and on to Central Market, then up the escalators, gliding by Tai Kwun, and finally back on to Hollywood Road again. Hong Kong can be a fishbowl, your fishbowl, if you have nothing else better to do.

Today is not a nothing-else-better-to-do kind of day. If there ever was such a day. Corporate types and monks would tell you there is not. Today, I do the fishbowl with a friend who explains to me how Gilgamesh and Enkidu could be gay lovers. A friendship taken in a different direction, although not a circular one. As we walk, and as my friend explains, I cannot help but recall what had happened in the places we pass. Dates. Misunderstood conversations later clarified with a single text message. Kisses. Arguments. Physical fights. Reconciliations. Strong Zeros in the park. Therapy Sessions. Apologies. Goodbyes.

The Epic of Gilgamesh begins with the city walls of Ur and, as my friend explains while we make our way to the escalators, ends with the city walls of Ur. Gilgamesh looks up at them, contemplates them. How old is this story again?

We do not have city walls here. We do have hills and stairs and neighborhoods poured around these elements like batter into a cake mold from which concrete blocks rise. Summer the oven.

I return to the imposter apartment to sit on the terrace to think about the fishbowl I will leave behind. It would be a good moment to smoke a cigarette if I smoked. I used to keep a pack of cigarettes for a friend in the drawer of my desk for whenever they visited. Usually smoked when drunk. Usually drunk when smoked.

Soon a friend who does not smoke will arrive, and I will force them to watch a slow documentary about trees with me because it is not the kind of movie I could sit through alone, if any. Upstairs, a grandmother is instructing her granddaughter on how to fold laundry. Now that the construction has stopped for the evening, their voices carry, and the cockatoos make their circles overhead.