Velvet Cage

When the whole city began to speak to me

My makeup mirror reflects two lives: on the left is a perfect smile carefully drawn, and on the right is the trace of fatigue wiped out by the makeup remover cotton. In my fifth year in Manhattan, I found that I was no longer just an emotional seller, but also a wound suturing doctor of this city - fingers wrapped in velvet gloves, touching those hidden pains that even psychiatrists could not know.

Dusk clinic in Central Park

The old banker's cashmere scarf always smells like mothballs, as if to preserve the time of 1948. When he corrected my pronunciation of "Winter Dream" for the 17th time today, I suddenly saw that there were two teenagers living in his pupils: one was a big shot on Wall Street, and the other was forever trapped in the attic in Brooklyn where love letters were hidden. When the dusk stretched our shadows like two melted candles, I changed the script without authorization - I read the period at the end as a tremolo.

Mother River in the Perfume Bottle

The laboratory of the mixer always reminds me of my grandmother's sewing room. She broke the test tube again today, and the glass shards looked like scattered diamonds in the morning light. "Do you smell it?" She suddenly grabbed my wrist covered with hand cream, "This is the smell on my mother's pillow when she was dying..." I counted the pinholes left by chemotherapy on the back of her hand, and suddenly hoped that I was really a perfumer - not a liar who used lies to mix placebos.

Silent Million-Dollar Phonograph

There are too many noises hidden in the parenting recordings of quantitative geniuses: there is the sound of wine glasses colliding at the 12th minute, and vague sobs at the 37th second. When he was drunk in front of the recording device last night, I secretly deleted the sentence "Julia said the child is not like me". Now he still has unsent Disney tickets in his suit pocket, and the gold-plated font is slowly fading in sweat, just like the smiling faces in his son's picture album that are always missing mouths.

Velvet Cage

The sign language of deaf dancers is more moving than any music. When the cable car reached the highest point, she suddenly used her toes to draw the beat of Giselle on my palm. We looked at the lights on the other side of the river, and at that moment I absurdly wished that I really knew ballet - instead of wearing rented red shoes and dancing a never-ending requiem in someone else's tragedy.