“Clack!”—my pen falls from the table of the lecture chair;
I’ve dozed off with my hair—
sometimes red, sometimes blue—on my face; here and there
I find friends, laughter, footprints, knowledge
greeting me from time to time; it is not rare
to see people exposing their toes
to feel the breeze and the freeze with the lovely flip-flops
on their feet; how carefree they are!
But we have no excuses to make it top
with our moments: the black-bean flavour—
it is so black, ink-like, like the darkness
that bestows on us with our eyelids having skin-ship together;
how mindless we are! That pot of hot black-bean soup
is lucky enough to be rescued by a friend of ours!

Hooray! We dance; we sing our favourite songs—
songs from The Phantom of the Opera series;
we invent our way of walking, duckling-like, chick-like, penguin-like,
silly little us stepping at the same spot a million times,
holding a big bag of dirty clothes with my right
hand and her left hand, walking, waiting for the elevator,
and walking to the laundry-zone.

Night comes every day, like Aunt Flo visits us every month.
“Tap, tap, tap”—fingers flying on the keyboards—
“P-R-E-S-E-N-T-A-T-I-O-N”—that lingers
our whole night at Room 1019. Days wake us up from deep sleep,
and the barking alarm destroys every morning of mine, but not hers;
her killing weapon does her no harm! At 7:45 am, it barks;
at 7:46 am, it barks again; 7:47 am, again and again—until I leave
my sweet warm bed and crawl towards hers and yell at her
until she can see my throat. If the ruff-ruff sounds
haven’t done their job, she could have changed the alarm tone,
but she is wise and smart to wake me up to wake her up.

One day, the yellow umbrella rang the bell of all of us;
our iPhones dinged a thousand times, dinged
extremely loudly, dinged to make us
more and more alert to the messages we all received.
That was a heartbreaking day that we could give no more
energy to cry, to cry for help, to cry for the moon,
to cry out loud for us, ourselves only—and
it falls again—“Clack!”

Editor’s note:
“All Those Moments” was first published
(in a different form)
in the newsletter of
Effulgence – HKBU English Language and Literature Society 1516.

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Mignon Chiu is a fourth-year student at the Department of English and Department of Education. [Read all entries by Mignon.]