Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 2020complete | Page 508

to her and all she said was that I needed a fresh start. I wanted to ask her more questions and just before I
could speak to her my co-worker came up to me and asked me a question, and suddenly when I turned
around the lady was gone as if she was never there in the first place. I walk back to my desk and just stare at
my computer for the next few hours. I felt numb, nothing made sense to me.
Its 9:00 pm, I take the metro for exactly 46 minutes on the green line, by 10:00 pm I arrive at my station.
By 10:14 pm I am walking the 12 minute journey home. I walk home as quickly as possible, nothing is
making sense. I feel crazy, all I want is answers, I knew I had to leave, all the work and the money was
never going to be the answer to my pain.
Anger works in mysterious ways, it comes from deep within us and attacks when we least expect it. On this
Tuesday I came home and before I knew it, I became a different person. I was mad. I was mad at my past, at
my wife and at what my life had become. Screams crawled out of my chest and echoed through my house. I
smashed everything; all my wife’s old vases, all the pictures hanging on the wall. She isn’t alive anymore I
have to let go and stop hanging on to the past. I turn around and standing there is the same lady that has
been appearing all week, all she says is “congratulations, you can finally move on.”
That night I left. I left my home, I left my job and I left the Greater Bay Area, I left the place that was
home. Deep down I knew the moment that she walked out on our argument and never came back, that was
when the Greater Bay Area stopped feeling like home. After that night I never came back I left every morsel
of my past there.
It’s been three years since I left the Greater Bay Area. I finally feel some peace. It’s been seven years since
my wife, Jade, disappeared. People say that time heals all wounds, but this was one wound that needed more
than time to heal. Each individual human experiences growth in their own way, some people grow mentally
and some grow physically. I needed to lose everything that was comfortable to finally be able to grow and to
heal my wounds.