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“Difficult,” I answer honestly before I can stop myself. A laugh escapes my throat. I gesture at the misshapen paper on my stall. “The world may be mine to explore, but I know not what to do. Nor when to quit.”

Weifeng picks up a damp piece of paper. The sheets are warped, undulating where they should lie flat and straight. It feels like he is weighing my soul. I clamp down on any excuses for the clumsy handiwork.

“You are better once you get started. The deckled edges are more even on the later sheets.”

His compliment undoes me entirely. I tell myself I do not need it, and yet I fold it into my chest like a precious gift, only to be unwrapped under the cover of darkness.

I let my imagination soar. What could have been.

I nod, hoping my voice will not give me away.

“It always comes out this shade of grey. I was thinking of using flowers or leaves to dye it.”

“Willow leaves,” Weifeng says. I recognise the twinkle in his eye. He is trying me. Mocking us.

“Willow trees and pavilions.” The teasing brings me back to earth, solid and gritty underneath my nails. It reminds me that I do not need him. I do not need anyone.

LOW

Meiyu was in love. The birds knew it, singing her lover’s name from the branches of the willow tree.

The koi fish knew it, coming to the surface of the pond to kiss her as he had kissed down her neck.

Only her father did not know it. He took her hand and talked of ambitious men and na?ve young women.

The fragility of paper, so light it could be swept away by a breeze.

Of freedom and boundaries and finally, when she still refused to pay him any heed, of sending her lover away in disgrace.

Meiyu did what all the great love stories had taught her.

She shouted and wailed, locked herself in her room and refused to eat, apart from the three sweet buns that her maid smuggled into her room, vowing it would be the last morsel to pass her lips this month.

And the congee in the morning, but that was mostly water.

Also the nashi pears she pilfered from the garden, but they hadn’t come via the kitchen so hardly counted at all.

She wrote letters to her lover, peeling sheet after sheet from her chest until she was raw.

About the quality of his lips and his skin and his brow and being upstanding as a tree, or was it a mountain peak?

In any case she wrote across the pages, the ink hardly having time to dry.

Her maid returned with the smuggled responses.

Declarations of love and devotion in bold sword strokes.

She read them in bed, embracing them like her lover, but in the morning the ink had stained her skin and clothes, clinging to her.

After a few weeks, she had run out of things to say.

When all was said and done, they had hardly exchanged more than three awkward conversations.

For all she had imagined him saying to her, and all she had imagined responding, there were gaping holes in her knowledge.

He was a porcelain figure that she had placed upon the shelf.

The folded paper flowers she had made for him tore between her finger and thumb, yielding under the slightest pressure.

Perhaps, she thought, her father might have a point.

Her lover’s letters still came. Ours and mine almost unreadable in chaotic characters that filled an entire sheet.

Demanding more paper than she could make, than she wanted to give.

After a month, she gathered up the letters she had stopped sending back, holding the fragile paper in her hands.

A part of her she had been willing to give away.

She enjoyed the notion of being in love, the new taste upon her palate, more than the meal itself.

She tore the letters into shreds, the pieces like blossom petals around her.

A moment of infatuation to be savoured like all the other moments unfolding in her life.

One by one, she placed them on her tongue, absorbing them back into her body.

Then she peeled another sheet of paper from her skin.

A strip all the way down her arm. Blank as yet.

A new interest filled her days. She honed her paper cutting, delighting her maid with flapping butterflies and cranes; bringing back her father’s laughter with papercut dragon and tiger.

In winter she filled the garden with paper peonies and in summer, frogs to jump across the pond, never minding that her paper could not survive the wet and cold.

Her bond with her father grew stronger, and everything was as it should be.

“I fear there will be no one to look after you once I am gone,” her father said, holding up the papercut tiger. Once sharp and precise, a tiny spill of tea and it was ruined, paws soggy and beyond repair.

“I will manage on my own,” she protested. “Look how badly love turned out for me!”

Her father shook his head, the silver in his whiskers more prominent now. “Paper is too delicate. Let me introduce you to someone. There are more people in this world than one young clerk.”

“What if he is cruel and warty and old?”

Her father tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. He was indulgent. “Then you may turn him away. Cast him away with a hundred paper cuts. Make him wait under the willow tree for the rest of his days.”

Then one morning the double doors opened and he was not cruel nor warty nor old. Weifeng was the other half of her heart, although neither of them yet knew it.

WILL

At dinner, I have a second bowl of rice.

I eat the ribs with my hands, licking the juices that run down my fingers.

I have no qualms in helping myself, scraping the bottom of the dish clean with my spoon.

The warmth of the food is a novelty in my belly.

Hunger was something I had only learnt about of late.

I had thought myself acquainted with the notion, but in hindsight it was nothing but boredom.

True hunger, the type that gnawed on my insides, that distracted so I can barely put one foot in front of another, is an experience I only learnt after leaving my father’s home.

When I finally come up for air, Weifeng is watching.

He has ordered all my favourites, the ones he recalled from the old days.

It is like he has found a version of me, dusty and forgotten, wedged down the back of the cabinet.

The girl who likes sweet more than salty, who has not yet experienced bitter and sour.

His long, black hair lies loose around his shoulders, no longer pulled back into a tight bun now we have both fallen from grace.

It suits him. Once I mocked him for being so upright, as if he was a guardian lion at one of the temples.

It was only later I realised the stiffness was because of me.

The off-hand comments and requests that scattered from my mouth like wild seeds grew under his care, fragile roots becoming tougher than the hardiest weeds.

“Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?” Weifeng says. He does not stop. Does not blink.

“Like I am the sun in the sky.”

He quirks an eyebrow at the notion. “More the lonely moon.”

“Weifeng,” I say, and his name on my lips sends an unexpected shiver through me.

I try and fail to blank out the memory of when I last said it.

Aloud at least. I do not want to admit how many times I’ve said it in my dreams. Wondering if I regretted the decision I made. The anguish it caused us both.

“Why do you keep torturing yourself with that story. Surely there are others?” I ask, honestly wanting to know.

His answer is a long time in coming.

“I had this notion, that if I kept telling it, it would no longer hurt. I could purge it. Mock it. Confront it.”

“There will be none of you left at this rate.” I bite my bottom lip.

“Only the centre that is yours.” His eyes crease with his smile, making me blink. Paper walls are flimsy at the best of times.

“You are an arse,” I snap back, another paper cut upon his cheek.

“And a fool,” he agrees without missing a beat.

LOW

“Paper is delicate. More fragile than butterfly wings. A single mistake and it is ruined. I long for something more robust, that can be handled without fear of breakage,” Meiyu declared.

She had almost forgotten Weifeng walked at her side, until he mumbled, so softly that she had to lean in to hear him.

“You are too strong to break.” He did not look, eyes trained into the distance.

Meiyu wondered if she had imagined it entirely.

Only the flushed spot upon his cheeks told her otherwise.

They kept walking in amicable silence, their long shadows touching on the ground before them.

It made her smile, to imagine how he would jump for them to be so close.

The smells of the market filled her senses and for a moment they both took it all in.

A stallholder ran across the way, chasing after a couple of chickens.

Meiyu leapt back, Weifeng steadying her with hands upon her arms. Steam from the huge bamboo steamers glistened on his cheek.

Close enough to press her lips against his skin, the notion dizzyingly tempting. They sprang apart.

“What about you?” she asked in the awkwardness that followed.

“My family business is in pottery. Earthenware and porcelain.” His response was exact and rehearsed like a wind-up music box.

“But what do you dream of?” she persisted. His eyes widened, and Meiyu realised perhaps her question was too personal. His pale face softened like wet clay. A dimple appeared on his left cheek as he smiled.

“When I was a boy, I wanted to be an opera singer. An actor upon the stage with a pair of pheasant feathers in my hat. An orator of great renown. A puppeteer, even. I wanted to make my mark on the world, and not just pass through it.”

“But you are so quiet!” Meiyu blurted before she could prevent herself.