He had always enjoyed looking at people: more out of curiosity than out of pure entertainment, but still. He enjoyed observing people from a distance, from the rusty old ticket counter while sitting on his stiff plastic stool that was about to break down. Everywhere he looked, hands were interlocked, feet were intertwined, and faces were lit up. Occasionally, he would carry his broom near the door and sweep the same location over and over, just to get a closer look at the people around the block and inside the theater lobby. These supposedly happy emotions radiating off from the people in the cinema seemed like they were painting the stark concrete walls of the building in vibrant yellow. And the boy loved his job at this nearly burnt-down cinema in this nearly burnt-down neighborhood.

  He found the thought of looking at people quite compelling and he liked how the monotony of his work helped him ignore his breakup even more so. On a cold winter morning, the boy’s lover had brutally rejected the boy’s devotion. I don’t like you anymore, she had said. The boy was too startled to even attempt to hold her back. In a split second, his lover was gone from his sight, and the boy was left to swim in a sea of devastation. The bustling of people and the repetitive tasks that he was given gave him a moment to divert his thoughts, or at least shut out the misery for a few hours.

  One day, among the innumerable faces that passed by the counter, the boy saw a girl. The face of that girl was ingrained into his memory, like an ancient epic engraved into stone. Their first encounter had been on a hot and humid summer night, when the aroma of Angelonia had saturated the cinema’s atmosphere. It had ended as a brief conversation, but it dropped him into bliss, into endless ecstasy.

  “A ticket please,” she had said. Her faint smile that followed was an oasis in a barren desert. His eyes suddenly could not perceive anything other than utter whiteness, and the boy had been left speechless. Every inch of hair on his back seemed to stand up straight. At that exact moment, the boy fell in love.

  “Wh… what?” the boy had managed to blurt out.

  “The ticket. You know, for Love Actually?” Even as the girl was speaking, her smile didn’t seem to fade away. At this point, the boy began to feel like her smile was an innate part of her expression, just a natural part of her face. It reminded the boy of his past lover, of how she used to smile at him as if she had the entire world in her hands. Now she was gone, and this girl that was standing in front of him made him reminisce about the wondrous emotions he had shared with his love.

  “You… you seem quite familiar,” the boy murmured under his breath. It was a sound so indistinctive that the only line the girl could pick up was ‘you’.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Oh, um… nothing. I was just talking to myself,” the boy replied.

  “Sure, just give me the ticket please?” Then, to the boy’s disappointment, the girl’s faint smile instantly transformed into a lively giggle as a boy with a black ball cap and a varsity jacket walked up to the counter. He placed his arm on the girl’s shoulder and looked down at the boy. Anyone, with the slightest bit of discernment, could ascertain that the ball-capped boy was the girl’s boyfriend. As he stared at the boy at the counter, he felt a gush of joy and a sense of triumph taking over his body. The girl swiftly turned her back to the counter, facing her lover. They shared a gentle kiss, and the ball-capped boy gestured over to the boy to hand him over the ticket.

  “Oh, right. Popcorn too?” the boy asked. The boy attempted to remain calm. He himself also thought that the couple in front of his eyes was a perfect match for each other: a tough boy and a cute girl. Comparing that to himself, he was just a petty little boy at the counter selling tickets and scooping up sweet popcorn. He gave the couple their tickets and sat back down, falling asleep not because he was tired, but to avoid the unbearable agony burning inside.

  After the boy’s first encounter with the couple, the couple had regular visits to the cinema, all at night—particularly on a hot and humid night. As the hour hand struck the 9, the door would swing open and a dizzying scent of Jo Malone Blackberry perfume would slip up through his nostrils. The couple would casually walk up to the counter, asking for a ticket and a half-and-half large sweet and cheese popcorn. After the order, the boy would notice a swift, faint smile on the girl’s face as she looked straight into the boy’s eyes. That smile would always startle him, although the ball-capped boy was standing right next to her. It gave room for the boy to cultivate the sheer hope that maybe, just maybe, her hands would caress his hands and his lips would gently overlap with her lips.

  As days became a month, the couple had visited the theater for nearly 15 days, all promptly at 9 pm. The boy had now learned every little gesture, every little action that the girl was making every time she entered the cinema. And as he grew more attentive towards the couple, he looked forward to when the couple would show up and the girl would smile at him. Even as time passed, the girl’s smile was still lively; it turned the world upside down and filled the boy’s blank eyes with fluorescence. Every tick of the clock made his anticipation grow, and the boy grew less observant of the people around him and more observant of the time.

  A month and two weeks had passed when the couple abruptly stopped coming to the theater. The boy felt like all the colors around him had been lost. Even as he looked at the people coming into the cinema, he could only see the peeled-off wallpaper of the theater’s walls. Each new day he would stay sitting on his stool, waiting for the girl to show up and tell him that it was all a mistake, that she was sorry for ignoring his love, and that she needed time to push her boyfriend out of her life and come to him. But every day ended with the boy sweeping the floors of the cinema, all alone.

  It was 9 pm on an especially hot and humid night when the door swung open. The boy, having lost all of his hope that the girl would return, muttered a quick welcome and looked down at his phone. His memories of the girl were just about to fade from his memory.

  However, in the corner of his eye, the boy spotted a silhouette, one that he was so familiar with deep down his veins. He couldn’t bear to resist the temptation, although he did not want to suffer from disappointment once again. He flipped the phone over and managed to lift his head up, meeting the eyes of the girl that he was longing for so long. It felt like adrenaline was pumping through his body, from the top of his toes to his brain, and he could not say anything. His jaws were automatically dropped down, and he just stared.

  “Do you have tickets for Love Actually?” the girl asked. Her hair had been chopped short, but her angelic voice was still the same. The boy had somewhat waited for her to give him her exquisite smile, but her expression remained stern. “I heard that it’s on-air again as a Valentine’s special.”

  “Yes, yeah. I, I have two in the back,” the boy replied, still unable to escape from the awe that filled up his entire body. “I’ll get you one.”

  “Oh, and popcorn too.”

  “The usual half-and-half?”

  “Glad you remembered. But no, just the sweet one, please. No cheese. Screw the cheese.” The boy could sense anger from the girl’s firmness. He handed her a ticket and the popcorn and put the other ticket inside his pocket. He watched her from the back as she walked away and became one with the darkness of the cinema.

  The boy spent the entire two hours stunned by the girl’s reappearance. How fickle is my mind? he thought to himself. He felt the girl had been playing with him all along, using him as her toy. His thoughts were disturbed by the loud conversations of the people jumbling outside the cinema. He ran towards the lobby, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl. But everywhere he looked, the girl was nowhere to be found. She was not there: outside the door, in the lobby, nor near the water fountain. The boy couldn’t handle losing the girl once again. As his last hope, he carefully opened the door to the cinema and walked inside.

  Right there, in the fifth row, the boy could clearly see the girl with her face in her hands. In the pitch black of the cinema, he could only see the girl. She was like a rose that was growing from a dark concrete floor along the sidewalk. But, at that moment, the boy heard a muffled cry, and he was not certain whether or not it was coming from the girl.

  The boy was not the best at comforting others, and he definitely wasn’t ready to console the girl that he had grown to love so dearly. So he just stood there, at the very bottom of the cinema, looking up at the girl crying all on her own. His feet were implanted to the ground and the more he tried to move, his body grew stiffer as if shackles had binded his legs together. He was immobile, nor did he have the courage to either exit the cinema or go near the girl.

  “He broke up with me.” the girl cried out, into the hollow cinema. Her voice reverberated along the walls and lingered for quite some time. “He said he’d be there for me forever, but he lied. That b*****d.”

  The boy was unsure if she was talking to herself or to him. And so he just stayed.

  “Don’t you have anything to say? You saw us come to this place all the time.” Now, the boy was sure she was talking to him.  He felt a sudden rush of courage, probably due to the absence of that ball-capped boy who the girl was talking about.

  “I broke up too, although it was long ago. And I still remember that day,” the boy murmured under his breath. “She’d also promised that she would be there for me all the time.”

  “Huh, seems like we have something in common then. We were both thrown away like food waste left out in the streets, just waiting to decay.”

  “I wouldn’t call it food waste though. Because food waste isn’t recyclable. But minds are, aren’t they?” The darkness of the cinema wrapped around the boy’s body, but for some reason the darkness felt comforting.

  “Quite some philosophy there, but no. I don’t think my mind is recyclable,” said the girl. Once again, she had her head buried in her hands. The boy lifted his feet off the ground and climbed the stairs up to where the girl was sitting. Sitting down, he looked into the girl’s eyes but said nothing. The girl cried out, “What? Stop looking. Is this the first time you see someone cry?”

  “No, but it certainly is the first time I see someone cry so gorgeously,” the boy replied. The boy himself was quite surprised. But the euphoria of the moment had blinded him of any concerns or doubts that he had about himself or the girl. “But what I like better is seeing you smile.”

  The girl wiped her eyes with her hands and curled up into a ball. She looked up to the boy and said, “You know we’re strangers, right?”

  “Strangers? You have been living inside my mind since the first time I ever saw you. And It doesn’t matter that we’ve never actually talked before, because there is a connection between us. An exceptionally strong one,” the boy asserted. The boy’s voice was full of strength that was not seen before. A faint smile reappeared on the girl’s face. Even with her face covered in tears, she seemed perfect to the boy. “Stay here, I have something to give you.”

  “What?” said the girl, but the boy was already up and running. He dug through the piles of paper covering the counter. Underneath the files, he unearthed a ticket to tomorrow’s show of Love Actually. With the ticket in one hand, he ran back to the cinema and sat back down next to the girl. He handed her the ticket and slowly turned his body to face the girl. “What is this? And why are you giving it to me?”

  “It’s a ticket for tomorrow’s movie, the same one you just saw. Figured you’d want to cry a bit more and let all that emotion out. Because emotions hurt if you store them all inside, you know.” The boy had a wide grin on his face. “Breakups are hard, but they’re not the end of life. They’re just subtle hints of extraordinary things in our life.”

  The girl’s faint smile grew bigger and wider, and her tears were all gone by now. “Will you be here tomorrow?” the girl asked.

  “What do you mean tomorrow? I was always here, and I’ll always be here,” The boy chuckled, then locked his eyes with the girl.

  “Thank you for the ticket,” the girl said. She held firmly to the ticket, grasping a fist around the piece of paper.

  “And you? Will you come?” the boy asked.

  The girl stood up from the chair and for the first time, tenderly held the boy’s hands. “I’ll be here tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be here.”