Consider this for a moment: the Madonna tattooed on the tip of your tongue. You've endured much pain but get to show it to few, those you are keen to impress or truly care about. The consolation is that they will not forget. Not any time soon.
     Tonight, San Francisco is so cold, and I pause work to listen to the song. I don't recall hearing it at its release, in 2008 and in Hong Kong, but easily I can imagine encountering it back then, in this LKF bar or that Mid-Levels restaurant. I had spent time there that summer, a stopover en route from Stanford to my mainland Chinese hometown. I was still a student then. I woke up from a nap to reorient to the new time-space coordinates, then logged into gay.com and initiated a few chats. There was this one guy not far away from my hotel, and when he turned out to be even cuter in person, I agreed to both dinner and going home with him afterward, even though his home was an hour away, in one of those high-rises you could see when you landed at the airport. Before, or after, he turned off the lights, and we stood on the tiny balcony, our eyes on the planes taking off or touching down.
     In that darkness and silence, the one-night stand shapeshifted into something else. And holding on to that happening, his body so taut that night, the subway train whishing back downtown so fast the following morning, I felt a timeless quality saturating our last moments, as if the train my kismet heading to its finality, my flesh chipped away and yet my head held up high, affected smiles covering my pain airtight. At his stop, he slipped his number into my hand as he pecked his lips on mine, and my pain transfigured into a beam at that instance, broader and brighter than I had ever managed.
     I spent the rest of that summer in an aboriginal village in Taiwan, gathering oral histories for a class project, and my inbox was filled with his messages, my call history full of his name. He visited me at the end of the summer. Taking the high-speed rail, we headed from Taoyuan airport to Kenting. He also shared that he was on gay.com despite having a German-born, Californian-based "boyfriend," whom he met every year on alternate shores of the Pacific. His parents had split up when he was young, so he was brought up single-handedly by his mother, who then smiled at me from a photo on his phone, her dimples curled the same way as his did.
     I would hear similar stories from others later: makeshift solutions wrought by opposing demands, hard decisions forged midway between constraints. But for me, whose life then comprised simply a smooth progression through schools, such stories had a novel aura that attested to, more than anything else, a resilience that hallmarked adulthood. I held his hand and wanted to feel that power; I was attracted to him more simply because of these backstories, his grit burnished by all he had endured.
     In Kenting, we spent much time on the beach, where he picked up a white coral stone, wrote down "Forever," and handed it to me. A gift that marked our...fling? Friendship with benefits? Relationship? Why wrote "forever" when you knew there was no future for us? I asked him months later during my winter break, when I was again in his living room, but the spell between us had clearly broken. We danced in Propaganda the night before, but another patron approached us and asked me politely, can I borrow your partner for a moment? I wanted to say no, but he had already let himself in his arms.
     It was forever for that moment, he thus answered and looked away. Silence fell, breaking my connection with his pain.

*

I returned to Hong Kong two years later, to spend a semester at a graduate school there. Right before going there, I met a Stanford professor at a party. He did not teach at my department, so it was not violating any rule to see each other. He opened up for me after one date, in that he allowed my fingers to run along his muscles, as he let me know about the HIV floating in his veins. The same bulging muscles would tighten and slacken as he fell into and recover from meth relapses, he added, hesitantly as if this was a sliver of uglier truth.
     Damaged goods, all my friends thus advised—it was pre-PrEP time. But the professor also spoke three languages, gave flute concerts, and walked catwalks. My fingers lingered on the blond hair trailing down from his navel while my mind efforted not to name the thing between us—I just wanted to be present for the moment: enjoy the firmness arousing and resisting my touch; chewing on the secretes luring and warning me in silence.
     My rooming apartment in Hong Kong was in a dingy ten-story dwarfed by newer and flashier towers, and direct sunlight could not reach my window until close to noontime. It was almost depressing to stay there for long, so I spent much time in the library or out meeting friends and friends' friends. And there was one such friend's friend particularly interested in integrating me into the local circles. Once, he even suggested I move into his apartment, which was new, west-facing, and always bright.
     I might have enjoyed all this, but the professor and I still exchanged emails and phone calls. He usually called at night, when he woke up and I was lying abed, lights off and the tram clanks ringing outside my shut windows. He explained that both his HIV and meth problems had originated from a bad breakup and the resultant depression, and when his stories of suffering—his suicidal thoughts in particular—prompted me sleepless deep into the night, I thought I understood him, or at least was en route to that understanding. Haven't we all heard Thanatos knocking at our doors at some point? And who has a perfect solution to the existential angst? The professor's suffering prompted in me a desire to be his boyfriend, to save him with my tender and boundless love.
     But when daylight shone, I still hung out with my suitor every so often. His hometown was close to mine, so we conversed in our native dialect. We watched movies in Broadway Cinematheque not far from his home, and we hiked in the New Territories and the outlying islands. One evening, after a depressing movie, I walked him home, but he suggested talking by the harbor, where dikes extended into the inky water reflecting Central's glistening spires. With his face hidden in the dark, he told me about his first relationship. He and his lover were both young, freshly out of college. He moved in with him but soon found the lover had depression. Once, after a trip together, he went to the lobby to check out first. He waited for his lover to come down until an ominous suspicion gripped him; he rushed back only to find everything was already over: the lover had leaped out of the window and crashed on the sidewalk.
     I thought of telling the story to the professor when he visited me one month later, but decided against it as he might be just a bottle of benzodiazepine away from a similar decision. The professor stayed in my depressing room for only one night and then booked a hotel. For the next week, I stayed with him there and showed him around with the happiness one would feel when visited by an actual boyfriend. Later though, after I returned to San Francisco, the professor confessed that my depressing room had reminded me of his own student days and, by implication, the gap between our age and life experiences. He thought we'd better be friends.
     Why didn't you say anything when you were there? I demanded, didn't then know he had already been seeing someone else. I felt betrayed by his withdrawal but also embarrassed by my thought of saving him—an idea only demonstrated how little I had been aware of my positioning, how off-the-mark my grip was on the hard thing called life.
     And tonight, recalling these decade-old events, I find how the professor answered my question has already escaped me, as has how I responded to my suitor's before I left Hong Kong: would you find a job here and stay with me? I know I must have felt angry toward the professor, as there must be some discomfort in rejecting the suitor. Strong emotions fade with time, and in their wake, it is these men's suffering that I most vividly remember. Listening to Juno Mak's song, I imagine their suffering the Madonna on their tongues, and when they speak, even from behind the veil of time, their flickering tattoos still fit my attention to their shapes.

*

Before dinner, my husband and I walk our two dogs. We do not plan to go far, just to the dog park two blocks away and then back. With Covid-19 raging outside, we've been spending our day working at home in different rooms, and now, the first time being together after a long day, we still don't talk much. Our attention is still gripped by a tension that had come with work, finding more relaxation in the dogs than each other.
     I am not worried, though; we had shared much during our eight years together. I know, for example, that he grew up in the Black Forest and had a pet snake as a child. When he was ten, and my mother-in-law turned 40, he woke up at 5 am to bake her a cake. Another time, he called the restaurant where my in-laws were and requested a special menu, as they happened to be there celebrating a wedding anniversary.
     I relish these stories and wish we could raise our own children thus considerate, but part of me also wishes for more drama, stories of suffering like those men I associate Hong Kong with. Perhaps I would love him more, playing my part to balance his karmic debts? Or am I simply thirsty for stories of suffering and pain, surmising their cuts could bring us closer to the truth of life, hidden facets we only share with those we are keen to impress or truly care about? I know how bizarre this would sound so I keep it all to myself; I run a few laps with the dogs in the park and then head home through the dead streets.
     Then I remember the lyrics of the song calling for feeling each other in silence; I wonder whether my husband could feel my thoughts.

*

My husband also has ties with Hong Kong: he develops properties in the US for a tycoon there. Lately, in the silence that clouds our days, we discuss the metropolis less often, as only disheartening news is coming out of there: how the university has removed the "Pillar of Shame" commemorating 1989, how one after another newspaper is closing shop. I lift my eyes up from these heavy words and recall my time there, all these men I have and will forever associate with the city. I picture the hubbubs suddenly evaporating from the teeming streets of Central, Causeway Bay, and TST, pedestrians now all walk in silent, uniformed locomotion, as if they are products on convey belts.
     In that deepening and suffocating silence, are we still telling each other the Madonna on the tips of our tongues? Or perhaps, the silence itself has become our latest tattoo? Sinking deeper into that space where all words are frozen, erased, or pulverized, maybe our fumbling fingers can still make out the outlines of pain and love, our bodies tremor amidst a silence that is even thicker than we had ever fathomed.

__

The piece's origin is my random encounter with the song. All the rest is associative thinking.