Confessions of a Cat-holic (126)

Twenty years ago, the Mong Kok malls were a different scene. There used to be a mall in Causeway Bay next to World Trade Center that specialized in selling sex toys. Nevertheless, one floor above it was a deck of silverware stores. And I liked to shop around that area.

I never stepped into the sex toy shops, worrying that they would force me to buy a dildo if I looked curious or interested. But they had those boutiques and pet shops in that mall, which now no longer existed.

I guessed it should be my turn to show him my love too, after all he had showed me enough. I wanted to buy him a couple ring, one for him and one for me. I couldn't afford to buy a gold one so I guessed those silver rings were good enough. So I went into those silverware shops that looked really goth and emo. It was a fine line between MK and emo goth anyways. A typical MK person would have slide cut bangs, spiky hair at the back, dyed and highlighted, to match a skull silver ring and sometimes a bangle. I didn't know the size of his fingers but just from holding his hands so many times, I had a brief estimate of his size and I picked a bigger one in case it might not fit. To me, the ring itself definitely signified a promise but I wanted to convey something a bit more than that.

I especially requested to have our couple rings carved with a special message. I wanted it to convey a message just understood by the two of us. So I picked Italian. Italian was famous for the mafia and he was a gangster from Macau. What better language could convey my hidden messages? So I requested to have his ring carved with the words "Ti voglio bene" and my ring "Sei la mia anima gemella".

I quietly wrapped the couple rings in a box and put it into a bag and gave it to him the next day as a gift. I asked him to open it right away. He did. I showed him the carvings on the side of the rings. He said nothing and he didn't ask me what they meant.

I guessed people who knew me well enough would agree that I was not that kind of girlfriend who liked to check my boyfriend's phone every minute or asked to hang out with him every single day. And Rex knew that too. So he never asked to talk to me on the phone when we were home. I believed it was healthier for an intimate relationship anyways. I was a psycho-logical person, yes, psycho but logical. I didn't think that love could bring us salvation. I didn't easily trust people either but I would not be using low level tricks to hijack and hack my boyfriend's phone, just to find out whether he was cheating on me.

Rex gave me a lot of respect. He never asked me to do things that I felt uncomfortable about. I knew on the surface I looked clueless about many things, like I didn't know who else he was going after before he asked me out. Actually, I had to say that I knew enough about Rex to be sure what kind of a person he was. It was obvious that he belonged to the triad, without his telling. The fact that he was greeted with welcomes wherever he went on the dark side already meant a lot to me. And he specialized in snooker. That said something about him. Everyone knew that the snooker clubs were run by the mobs, together with the fruit stalls, sauna baths, foot massage spas, brothels, night clubs, and porno DVD distributors. You could totally tell what kind of person he was by his favorite pastime. A math-lete liked cracking equations and he would grow up to be an accountant. A gangster liked soccer games and snooker, he would grow up to be a football club owner or syndicate. Fair enough.

I could never grab hold of Rex's photos. One time, he posted some pictures of him with his friends on the internet. I quickly saved them onto my computer. God damn it, he was tech-savvy enough to make it into ultra small resolution so no one could recognize his face. I knew it was him of course, since I was his one and only girlfriend. But any strangers who barely knew him would find it futile to stalk him via the internet. Well, I would rather get to know him in person anyways.