Dialects of Green
Hong Kong was not a city to me. It was our apartment building on Argyle Street with its forest green exterior, now painted over in a nondescript shade of beige. It was the jade donut on a red thread around the neck of my kindergarten crush. It was the looming hill of weathered concrete where Mimosa pudica grew between the graves. It was Sailor Jupiter. It was my favourite pencil crayon used to draw an imaginary landscape over and over again.
Have you endured a setting sun? Mandy and I observed its descent for an hour before the island across the bay took precedence. Geography denied us a visible horizon, but I hoped for a green flash anyway. Perhaps hope is a cousin to patience; both sound more dignified than waiting around for something favourable to happen. The beach was full of cold pebbles and void of people for the same reason. Summer had not yet settled in. Seaweed looked like tufts of uranium glass strewn along the shoreline.
The first trip we took together brought us to a restaurant inside a greenhouse. Unbridled joy coursed through my being: I did not expect fresh tomato soup in wintertime Iceland, or to drink a bowl of it next to vines upon vines of the ingredient. Most unforgettable was the scent—that sunny herbaceousness of tomato leaves, in high concentrations—saturating the humid air around us. I wanted to bottle it up, send it across an ocean. "Freely emeraldine," the cryptic message would say.
