My name is Avocado. It’s not my real name, of course. My real name is a sensible, two-syllable thing my parents chose from a book of lucky characters. But Avocado is what I am. Tough, leathery skin on the outside, a history of protecting myself from bruises and blemishes. And inside, a large, stubborn pit where my heart should be, surrounded by something that can so easily turn bitter if not handled just right, if not given the exact right conditions of sun and patience.
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I live in Hong Kong, a city that understands the necessity of a hard exterior. We build upwards, stacking lives upon lives in concrete towers that pierce the humid, neon-drenched air. There is no room for softness here. Efficiency is the true currency. And in the economy of relationships, I am a catastrophic market crash.
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I am a monster. A witch. I know this because I have the evidence, scrawled not in ancient texts but in the digital ghosts of past relationships. A gallery of good men, now faded and poor, left in the wake of my passing.
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There was Leo, the architect. He dreamed of designing sustainable, beautiful spaces. I dreamed of a waterfront apartment in Kennedy Town. I criticized his blueprints for being “unambitious.” I called his favourite jacket, the one with the slightly frayed cuffs, “tacky.” I took him to view show flats we could never afford and watched the light in his eyes dim as he calculated the years of his life it would cost.
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Then Ben, the teacher. Kind, endlessly patient with his Primary Three students. He was happy. He lived in a modest flat in Fanling with two roommates and talked about the profound privilege of shaping young minds. I told him he was settling. I mocked the laminated posters of inspirational quotes in his bedroom. I asked him why he wasn’t looking for a job at an international school, for better pay, more prestige. I made his contentment feel like a failure.
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I was the reason it all went nowhere. I was the cold front that killed every tender shoot. I kept raising the standards, a brutal game of emotional limbo they could never win. They could have found lovely, gentle girls who would have been thrilled to build a life in a 400-square-foot public housing flat, who would have found joy in a shared bowl of fishball noodles at a dai pai dong, whose laughter wouldn’t have been laced with the acid of disappointment.
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Do you hope to get closer? A voice, my voice, whispers it in my head whenever a man shows interest. Is it okay? Is it okay? The questions are a trap. I let them get close enough to see the monster’s shadow, to hear the witch’s whisper. I let myself believe, for a fleeting moment, that this time it might be different. That I might be different.
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I thought we were getting closer, but unfortunately you were human, and unfortunately I'm a monster.
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And then I met him.
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His name is Sam. He is, by any objective measure of my former criteria, entirely insufficient. He’s a technician for a film equipment rental company. He doesn’t have a five-year plan; he has a plan for the upcoming weekend, which usually involves trying a new cha chaan teng and maybe watching a movie. He wears slightly too-large t-shirts with faded logos of obscure bands. He is, I suspected early on, a little bit stupid.
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But he is gentle.
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We met at a terrible party in Sai Ying Pun, in an apartment with a breathtaking harbour view and zero soul. He was the only one not trying to be someone else. He was standing by the snack table, looking genuinely delighted by the quality of the prawn crackers. I, having just eviscerated a venture capitalist with a well-aimed comment about his ethical flexibility, felt drained and monstrous. Our eyes met. He didn’t look away. He just offered me the bowl of crackers.
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“These are really good,” he said, as if sharing a profound secret.
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That was it. No slick line, no posturing. Just prawn crackers.
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He asked for my number. I gave it to him, a reflex of a self I no longer recognized. He texted the next day. Not a “hey” or a “what’s up.” A picture of a ridiculously fluffy orange cat sleeping on a pile of camera cases at his work, with the caption: “My new production assistant. Demands payment in belly rubs.”
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I stared at the phone. The pit in my chest felt… strange. Not smaller. Just… quieter.
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Our first proper date was for egg waffles. Not cocktails. Not a tasting menu. Egg waffles. From a street stall in Mong Kok. He bought one and insisted I have the first bite, the crispiest, most golden bubble. “The best part,” he said, as if bestowing a crown.
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He always lets me have the first bite of everything. The first sip of his milk tea, the first taste of the sizzling plate of beef and eggs he orders for us to share, the first strawberry from the top of the cake. It’s a small, stupid thing. But no one has ever done that for me. My previous relationships were negotiations, subtle battles over the best cut, the prime location, the lion’s share. With Sam, it is a quiet, unshakable doctrine: the first bite is mine. It is his first article of faith, and he practices it with the devotion of a pilgrim.
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And he always, always escorts me home. Not in a possessive way. In a “the MTR is crazy at this hour, and your heels look treacherous” way. He rides the train with me from Central to Quarry Bay, walks me to the entrance of my tower, and waits until I’m through the glass doors. He never asks to come up. He just stands there, under the flickering streetlamp, and waves until the elevator doors close.
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It makes me feel terrible.
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His gentleness is a spotlight, and it illuminates the ugliness of my own history with a brutal, unforgiving clarity. Every time he offers me the first sip of soup, I see Leo flinching as I criticized his choice of restaurant. Every time Sam waves goodbye from the pavement, I see Ben’s slumped shoulders as he walked alone to the MTR after I’d rejected his plan for a hike because it was “boring.”
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I am a gargoyle perched on the precipice of his good heart, and I am terrified I will soil it. The monster wants to criticize his job, his lack of ambition, his simple t-shirts. The witch wants to brew a potion of disappointment to protect herself from the terrifying vulnerability of his kindness.
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One Tuesday, after a long, soul-crushing day at my PR job where I had to spin mediocrity into gold for a client I despised, I met him for dinner. I was a raw nerve, a storm contained in a pencil skirt. He was his usual, placid self, telling me a long, meandering story about a faulty camera lens and a very stressed-out director.
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I snapped.
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“Why are you always so okay with everything?” The words were shards of glass, flung across the table. “Don’t you want more? Don’t you get bored? Don’t you ever look at your life and think, ‘Is this it?’”
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The silence that followed was absolute. The other diners in the humble noodle shop stopped their slurping. I had done it. I had drawn blood. I had shown him the monster. My heart, the pit, was a cold, hard stone. This was where he would leave. This was where he should leave.
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Sam looked at me. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t get angry. His eyes, warm and brown, just held my gaze. He slowly picked up the bowl of wonton noodles between us, carefully selected the plumpest, most perfect wonton with his chopsticks, and placed it in my bowl.
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“The first bite,” he said softly. “You look like you had a bad day. The first bite always makes it a little better.”
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Tears. Hot, shocking, and entirely unbidden, welled in my eyes. I had shown him utter ugliness, and he had responded with a wonton.
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The boundaries broke.
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It wasn’t a dramatic shattering. It was a quiet seepage, like the first drop of rain after a long drought. The rigid, carefully constructed walls I had built around the pit in my chest didn’t collapse; they just became porous. And beauty, a quiet, terrifying beauty, began to seep in.
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It was the beauty of his consistency. The beauty of his simple, unquestioning belief that the first bite was mine. The beauty of his presence under the streetlamp, a constant in the chaotic flicker of my city.
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Will you give me trust? The question was no longer mine to ask of him. It was his to ask of me. And he had asked it not with words, but with a prawn cracker, a fluffy cat photo, a hundred escorted journeys home.
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And I, the monster, had to answer.
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I looked down at the wonton in my bowl. I picked up my chopsticks. My hand trembled. This was the trust. To accept the first bite. To believe, for one terrifying second, that I was worthy of it not because of my job, my sharp tongue, or my ambitions for a Kennedy Town apartment, but simply because I was me. The me that included the monster.
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I took a bite. The wrapper was silky, the prawn inside sweet and springy.
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It was the best thing I had ever tasted.
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I looked up at him, my vision blurred by tears I no longer tried to hide. “It’s good,” I whispered, my voice thick.
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He smiled, a slow, warm sunrise of a smile that reached his eyes. “I know,” he said. And then he reached across the table, not for the food, but for my hand. His fingers were calloused from handling heavy camera gear. They were gentle.
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The boundaries were broken. The beauty was seeping in. I didn’t know if we would get together, not in the way my old self would have demanded, with a defined future and a five-year plan. But for the first time, I hoped my heart, that hardened pit, could be softened. Not by grand gestures or impressive salaries, but by the relentless, quiet gentleness of a man who was a little bit stupid, and infinitely wise.
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He was human. I was a monster. And for now, that was okay. It was more than okay. Under the fluorescent lights of a noisy noodle shop, holding the hand of the man I’d just tried to push away, I finally understood.
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The first bite wasn’t a prize to be won. It was an offering. And for the first time, I was ready to receive it.
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and then Add to home screen.