The silk scarf dangled from Ming’s slender fingers like a resigned serpent. Twenty-three floors up, the city sprawled below her apartment window in a maze of neon and shadow. She’d bought the scarf last spring, when hope still bloomed like the cherry blossoms along Huaihai Road.
“You’re being dramatic again,” Ah Chen said from the doorway, his voice carrying that familiar tone of amused condescension. He stood there in his tailored suit, every inch the successful young professional she’d fallen for two years ago.
“Am I?” Ming turned, letting the silk catch the dying sunlight. “Wasn’t it you who said we needed to ’tie ourselves together’ forever?”
He sighed, running fingers through carefully styled hair. “We were kids then, Ming. Twenty is practically childhood.”
“And twenty-five is so worldly?” The words tasted bitter on her tongue. The scarf - their modern rope of fate - had been his gift on their first anniversary. Now it felt more like a noose around her dreams.
“The company is sending me to London,” he said, as if announcing tomorrow’s weather. “Three years, minimum. It’s an opportunity I can’t refuse.”
Ming’s laugh was sharp enough to cut glass. “Can’t? Or won’t?”
“You could come with me,” he offered, but they both knew it was empty words. Her aging parents, her fledgling career at the gallery - these weren’t things one simply abandoned for love. Not in their world.
“Remember what you told me that night on the Bund?” She wrapped the scarf around her wrist, watching the pattern of butterflies dance across the silk. “‘Love is the only truth in this city of lies.’”
Ah Chen looked away, his perfectly composed facade cracking just slightly. “We were drunk on baijiu and possibilities.”
“No,” Ming said softly, “we were drunk on truth. Now we’re sober with reality.”
She crossed the room, her bare feet silent on the hardwood floor. The scarf unwound from her wrist like a falling star. With gentle precision, she tucked it into his breast pocket, a splash of color against the charcoal suit.
“Take it,” she whispered. “Let it remind you of the truth you once knew.”
His hand caught hers, warm and familiar. “Ming…”
“Go chase your London dreams, Ah Chen.” She stepped back, creating a chasm between them that felt wider than the ocean he would soon cross. “Some ropes are meant to be cut.”
Later, after he’d gone, Ming stood at her window watching the city lights blur through her tears. Below, countless young lovers were probably making the same promises she and Ah Chen once had, binding themselves with invisible threads of hope and desire.
She pressed her palm against the cool glass, leaving a ghost of warmth that quickly faded. In the end, she thought, all ropes - modern or ancient - were really just beautiful illusions we wrap around our hearts until reality forces us to unravel them.