The past few weeks, I’ve been haunted by the same looping nightmare. In it, I am waking up from a long sleep. I check the wall clock. I realize I am half an hour late for my shift at the bookstore. Shit, I think to myself, and rush into the bathroom to wash my face. When I emerge seconds later, I look at that clock again. This time, the faintly glow-green hands tell me I am three hours late. What the fuck, I say aloud, but my dog, my partner, the apartment, and world I am in doesn’t seem to share my anxiety. You’re fine, my partner says, and I keep telling him I’m not. I can’t be late, I say, they need me there, I’m the only person opening up today. The next time I look at the clock, another long expanse of time has elapsed.
The dream diverges at this point. In one version, I rush out and there is a raging typhoon. Everything is pitch black, and I have to find a taxi, or a bus, or the train station, in the dark. In another, everything is sunny, but I can no longer remember how to get to work; the MTR lines are all mangled and incomprehensible, and the footpaths have all been rerouted. Sometimes, there is another anxious customer in the lift with me, waiting to see if we can make it in time. In all these versions, I am always late, whether by just a few hours, or an entire day. The bookstore is already dark, and there is a mysterious stranger winding down the blinds; he tells me that I’m too late, that they’re already closing. And in all these versions, time slips away like a river: in seconds, hours will have passed. Life keeps passing me by.
Next Friday, Bleakhouse Books will close its doors permanently in Hong Kong. I will have worked there for less than a year. Ever since we announced the closure, it has been busy; so busy that it’s hard to even process the inevitable ending. And every time I go back—because I work part-time—the shelves are a little emptier. Small things are disappearing: tables that are no longer needed, boxes of orders that have already been shipped out, piles of reserved books that customers are hurrying to pick up now that reservations are finite. I know why it’s happening, but still, there is a tinge of unreality to all of it.
There is a scene in the brilliant show Russian Doll (SPOILER ALERT) in which the protagaonist, a cigarette-chewing, firecracker-haired software engineer realizes that important foundational objects, and people, around her are disappearing. In order to stop it from happening, she has a choice to make: face her trauma, or let it kill her.
Sadly, we live not in a fantastical television show, but in real life. (I saw a meme the other day that said, to paraphrase: “I feel lucky I’m not actually playing Squid Game; I’m just living the reality that the show is a metaphor for.”) Often there is no way to avoid things closing, people leaving, objects vanishing. But the choice I can make is to not let that reality kill me.
This also happens to be the premise of the book of short stories I am currently working on. There, I said it! I realized that it’s a little shocking when I just drop that into casual conversation, so here’s me officially announcing a project I’ve been chipping away at since I left my full-time job in 2019. The genre is, loosely, a mix of speculative fiction and magical realism—there are stories set in Hong Kong, New York, London, and other places that are slightly removed from our reality. Vanishing is a reccuring theme. I write about fungus, merpeople, white feminism, cloning, artificial intelligence, and body horror. It’s really, really, really, really difficult. Most days, I actually want to give up, but then I see something on the news or wake up from a nightmare and think to myself: what else am I supposed to do except to keep writing?
So, having said that, it’s time for me to say goodbye to this newsletter so I can focus on other projects. There’s not much to say goodbye to, I know: I barely published a year’s worth of posts! For a while, I’ve been feeling ambivalent about continuing, and stressed about the pressure of consistency. I think when I started it I was hoping for an audience, a community. I quickly realized you were there all along.
This is a very long and roundabout way of me saying thank you. Thank you for subscribing, for reading, and for occasionally commenting! It meant a lot to me. For those who I don’t know personally, you can always stay in touch via the submission form on my website. I check it often, and I would love to hear from you. Thank you!