Bensimon died and his body was discovered crushed against the millions callous waves on the shore of lantau Island. Uncle Royce sent me many long, texts of uncertain meaning. Bensimon went hiking one day and then he did not come home. Uncle Royce wanted to reassure me that it was nobody’s fault, it wasn’t my fault to desert him, it wasn’t his fault, and there was certainly no need to blame myself for not taking care of him. I texted an emoji that meant meh. I didn’t intend it to sound cruel, but it captured how I felt. What could I have done? What could I have said to help Bensimon? He was engulfed in the dark shadows of his mind, and there was nothing anyone could have done, and the extending branches wrapped and took him away. What good would it have done to mourn the remains of Bensimon? He was gone now. We held an unassuming, almost mockingly small funeral for Bensimon in October. The bits of his body that remained were burned to ashes and discarded into the sea. Those were his true wishes.
The news of Bensimon’s passing did not arrive as a scream, but as a silence that swallowed all other sounds. It was a phone call, then a void. After I hung up, the world did not end; it simply became muffled, as if I were submerged in deep water. My brain, the organ I relied on for parsing art, for witty retorts, for remembering the precise number of pleats on a har gow, felt flooded. Thoughts that were once sharp and delineated became waterlogged, sinking into a formless, grey morass. I could not function. I moved from my bed to the chair and back again, feeling as if I were operating my body from a great, cold distance.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡU4KyXJR6pt
I was thinking about how to process the grief, but my mind kept circling back to a conversation we’d had, one of our last. Bensimon, with his weary clarity, had been talking about life’s phases. Most experiences in life, he’d said, are to prepare you for the next one. It feels like a complete regret to waste that time in the previous phase, but you wouldn’t have gotten to the next without it.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTb7QxCyWBV
Lying there in my silent, waterlogged state, I understood his words in a way I never had before. All those moments—the debates about virtuous artists on the MTR, the critiques of karaoke in a sterile café, the shared, quiet understanding that needed no words—they felt like a curriculum. They were preparing me. But for what? For a world without him in it? It felt like a monstrous, cruel joke. A waste of all that beautiful, intricate learning.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmArd9UMqqw
And for Bensimon? He never survived to get to the next phase. Or perhaps, as he sometimes seemed to believe, he had already advanced to the final phase a long time ago. He had always possessed a sort of preternatural wisdom, a sense of having seen the finale and found it wanting. He chased a life that was always elsewhere, his soul starved for a refinement this world could never quite provide. Now, he was truly elsewhere.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡv6s6Vz3mFC
People say the trick about life is to keep going. But sitting there, watching the afternoon light bleed from the Hong Kong sky behind my window, I realized there is no trick. That’s the whole of it. It gets easier, they say, but you have to keep going, and that is the hard part. The sheer, mechanical effort of continuing. Of breathing in, and breathing out, when every breath feels like a betrayal of the silence left behind.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9FFYxYGwiV
Whereas me, I didn’t know what I was doing, or what I was here for. I was just waiting for time to pass, a passive vessel for a grief I couldn’t yet feel in its full, sharp dimensions. I was waiting for the floodwaters in my mind to recede and reveal what wreckage they had left behind.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvpDqFFRp9I
Driven by a need to feel closer to him, I fumbled for my headphones. I found the piece he loved, the one he said was the most honest ever composed: Chopin’s Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 69, No. 1, which he always called by its nickname, L’Adieu. But in his more contrarian moods, he preferred to call it “Chopin’s Wrong Note.” He loved the slight, melancholy dissonance that appeared in the main theme, a tiny, heartbreaking stumble in an otherwise graceful melody. “It’s the sound of perfection acknowledging its own flaws,” he’d said. “The moment beauty remembers pain.”
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1r79OoXLFF
I pressed play. The gentle, rolling piano notes filled the void in my head, a structure built of pure, aching melancholy. I closed my eyes, and I mentally sat in my well, the deep, dark place inside me that was now flooded by memories. The music was the water I was drowning in, each note a ripple from a moment we had shared.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡasaDu7dZLu
I saw him leaning against a railing, explaining the soul of a starved artist. I saw his quiet smile in a café, his fingers tracing the rim of a coffee cup. I saw the way he looked at the city, not with Darcy’s boisterous affection, but with a critical, almost loving sadness, as if he were diagnosing a beloved, terminally ill patient.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRFQHrid2D2
The thoughts of him floated across the darkness behind my eyelids like clouds—soft, shapeless, and transient. No tear fell. The sorrow was too deep for that, a pressure at the bottom of the ocean where nothing moves. The music built, and with it, the memory of a specific afternoon. We had been caught in a sudden, soft rain on a walk through Victoria Peak. It wasn't a storm; it was a misty, gentle spit from the heavens. The raindrops were so fine and soft that they didn't sting, but merely settled on our hair and jackets like a cool breath.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ61O4w5c5eg
Sitting in my room, listening to Chopin’s stumbling, beautiful waltz, I felt that rain again. The sky spat its soft rain on us in my memory, and the drops hit my skin not like water, but like cotton candy pebbles—strange, sweet, and weightless. It was a sensation both real and impossibly surreal, a perfect metaphor for the unreality of grief itself.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡH8GStMTx1N
The piece drew to its quiet close, the “wrong note” resolved, the farewell complete. The silence that returned was different now. It was no longer empty; it was inhabited.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2IQRHeifQe
I drank some avocado juice that morning to calm my nerves. I took leave on that day and the day after. My boss approved it after I told him I bought tickets to attend a workshop on pottery. To Darcy: I sent him a text, which I wasn’t too sure what I meant. I couldn’t tell u anything. I didn’t screw anyone else. I hoped we could still make it work one day. I didn’t want to send him a long meandering text. I wanted to send it out almost like a work email.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡh835IY7dbM
No one reads it, no worries. My heart whispered. I was nervous that Darcy would send a rejection through. “I have not seen you for a very long time. Where the hell did you go to?” Darcy’s text came through. “Sorry but I can’t see you just yet.”
“Is that all you are going to tell me?” Darcy asked, with a grimace emoji. I did not reply. After that I took the train aimlessly, stopping at every stop. I noticed the newly fixed ticket gates, and wandering into each stop, each station was successively more similar to the ones before it. Every now and then I saw the streets which were torn out, and I wondered if I was wondering into the dark streets that Bensimon warned me about. I would walk aimlessly in the streets, by myself, like a lost soul, looking for an impossible treasure, driven by an unspoken siren. I would try to drive the thoughts of Bensimon away from my head. His beautiful and melancholic face. His soft broken voice, and later his loss of voice. His silence. It was so strange to feel the absence of his presence was so meh. His passage into the other world was so natural, like a deer that wandered too far into the woods. It would have been impossible for me to follow him. He spoke so naturally to the spirits when it sounded like the broken wooden branches chirping in the wind.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡaX244WiHTV
Bensimon, wherever you are now, I hope you found what you were chasing. I hope you finally found that life elsewhere, that perfect, refined state of being your soul always yearned for. Or, at the very least, I hope you are still in that chase, that the pursuit itself still brings you a joy it so rarely seemed to here. And I am grateful, so profoundly and painfully grateful, that you, with your difficult beauty and your starved soul, walked with me for a brief time during your stay on this earth. The path ahead seems dimmer now, but I will keep going. It’s the only trick there is.
ns216.73.216.64da2
and then Add to home screen.