Long have I departed from you, long have I been petrified at the front steps, gazing at the gate, reconstructing the countless hours you had spent here, with the stubborn street light, dimmed in the swirling smoke of nicotine.

For twelve years had it questioned your patient heart? It agitates me as I am ready to take the blame from your distorted eyebrows.

Yet only the moth is left clinging onto the wall, waiting, waiting — for the patina on the doorplate to be shined by the headlights again, for the lock to be jingled by the muted keys again.

Falling bricks, cracking pillars, dining table serves no dinner but dust, dancing in disdain.

Is your towel weeping? Rumour said your toothbrush confronted frigidity alone in the winter. Bizarre is your stereo buzzed occasionally as if you sighed bitterly beside me. What is your chair carrying? —

Mockery of my too late words? Tears washed in the mist of days? You are gone —

Then your ties suffocated themselves in a dead knot. In need of a psychiatrist, your coffee mug was desperate for a suicidal waltz, as the remedial requiem rebounded in the air:

“Out, out — why, still, am I lingering in this traumatic house?”

As dawn bursts through these shattered windows, I shall wake up from that nightmarish morning,

When the disordered thunder rolled onto your bed and robbed you of your beats.

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Pamela Wong is a second-year student studying in the Department of English. She reveals her emotional world through poetry. “Late Arrival” is a finalist of the English Poetry Contest 2015. [Read other poems from the 2015 contest.] [Read all entries by Pamela.]