Before the Year Ends by Cindy Ziyun Huang

If you go to a cinema on a Sunday afternoon in the winter, it’ll be dark by the time you leave. You feel like the world is about to end. The afternoon on a New Year’s Eve can easily make you feel the same way.

On the last afternoon of the year, Tamsin found herself walking aimlessly around the city centre with Jess. There had been little rain since the start of winter. Air pollution had been so bad that TV news kept telling people not to carry out any outdoor activities. Tamsin and Jess both wore respirator masks. White rubber straps fastened the masks tightly around their heads, like bridles reining them in.

This was the first time they’d seen each other in a long while. It was also their first time back in the city since they'd moved abroad to two different countries. Jess’s slicked-back haircut was new. Her face hid behind the mask and a pair of metal-frame glasses. Tamsin tried to picture what Jess used to look like, but the images from her memory were too zoomed-in for a reliable portrait to be painted. She remembered some faint brown freckles, a tiny blue mole, almost invisible baby hair on cheeks, and lips that had always been dry to touch.

Tamsin noticed Jess’s glasses fog up quickly every time she breathed out. The moist exhales made Tamsin think about the bathroom they shared in university. Steamy, dizzying. Their fallen hairs always tangled up and stuck to the wet white tiles after showers, entwining like broken lines on her palms. Encoded in the hair map was a message about their destiny that she hadn’t been able to decipher.

For most of that cold afternoon, neither of them spoke. A blanket of hazy air turned everything grey and grainy. Some Christmas-y lights floated in the heavy, noxious fog like little fluorescent halos. The city was silent and still. A leaden lung, no longer pulling air in.

‘So,’ Tamsin broke the silence and immediately noticed wariness in her voice. ‘When are you leaving?’

‘Next week,’ Jess asked. ‘What’s going to happen after we leave?’ Her question sounded like it held a quiet void in its centre. Behind her was the city’s central square, where an old statue of a deceased great leader stood. His raised right arm no longer looked as hopeful and regal as it had many decades ago. The fanatic followers he’d once summoned, hundreds of thousands of them, were gone.

Tamsin knew Jess’s question was about the city. When they’d been little kids, winter fogs had been milky white, wafting into the city before daybreak from the mountains around it. Now, they could see that the city was doomed. Poison had seeped deep into its soil and saturated its air. No one could explain how exactly the pollution started or who was responsible for it. Factories might have released too much chemical vapour, in haste to make a profit, and the city’s newly affluent residents might have bought too many cars, anxious to prove that wealth would bring a happy life. But there was more. Whatever had made the city rot was too big to be made sense of. In front of it, wisdom appeared useless, and bravery blind.

Tamsin recalled the story about a monkey king she had read when little. The monkey king, so powerful and agile, never got out of the clutch of Buddha Shakyamuni’s infinitely enlarging palm. The gigantic palm had now taken hold of her. She and Jess had left the city after graduating from university, but they couldn’t flee the growing shadow of the city’s destiny. Its silent pain would always hunt them down, although they were no longer entitled to claim it was theirs. The freedom to leave made them forever unfree.

It was never clear to Tamsin if they had mistaken, in despair, their shared desire for a different life as a desire for each other. They’d been very young and scared of the implications of love. Before they gathered the courage to admit their vulnerabilities, destiny had ordered them to go separate ways. Tamsin had dreamed of a different ending to their story, one in which they wouldn’t have to part ways and wouldn’t have to conceal the pain they were not entitled to. She’d dreamed of scenarios of bumping into Jess in the country where she lived now. A glimpse of Jess’s face on a crowded tram. An unexpected email saying she was in town for a day and wanted to meet up. A sudden encounter in a favourite restaurant. Or in a riverside park, or on a busy high street. Tamsin had imagined herself caught off guard, stunned and out of breath. What clumsy excuses could she come up with for not offering a hug?

Over the years, it had become her compulsion to wander into those long daydreams and forget about her real life. They would linger in her head like colour-changing afterimages printed on her retina after sharing at a fire for too long. She’d kept her daydreams a secret, hiding them in her stomach. They'd scalded her from the inside.

Strange enough, as she strolled around in the city centre with Jess on the last afternoon of the year, swaddled in the deadly air, Tamsin felt the pain of the scorch fading as the year’s end got closer every minute like death approaching. On the brink of a new year, time seemed to have been stretched into a funny, dangling string.

The year was ending. And with it, the world would end too. Soon the pain of unforeseen destiny wouldn’t matter any longer.

‘Do you want to have dinner with me before going?’ Tamsin asked. ‘Before the year ends.’

‘No. Tamsin,’ Jess said, and Tamsin didn’t need to look at her to know that she swallowed many words back down before continuing the sentence. ‘Maybe I’ll see you next year.’

They said goodbye before the night fell.

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Cindy Ziyun Huang is a London-based writer and translator. She contributes to art magazines including ArtReview and film festivals such as London Short Film Festival and Queer East. Her creative writings can be found in literary magazines such as Sine Theta Magazine and Tiny Molecules.

@cindaymorning