24h
A Day in Her Life
Weekdays (Monday to Friday)
Alarm goes off. You hit snooze. At least three times.
Actually awake. Scroll IG to check how many people viewed last night's story. Reply to a few DMs.
Get out of bed. Brush teeth. No breakfast — at most a can of Vita Lemon Tea. If there's class today you head out; if not, you stay sprawled in bed.
Out the door. You live in Prince Edward. Take the MTR to Kowloon Tong for CityU. The whole ride you're listening to your playlist — it's called "DON'T TALK TO ME," all techno and house.
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12:30 Arrive at school. If there's a lecture you go, but mostly you sit in the back row, half the time replying to WhatsApp. You find Business Administration boring, but you know your mum would be furious if you switched majors. 13:30 Lunch. Usually at the food court near AC3 — a thirty-something-dollar plate rice. Your budget is tight — eight thousand in wages, three-thousand-something goes to rent, about three thousand for food and transport, leaving a thousand-odd you want to save but somehow never can. Sometimes to cut costs you grab a sandwich from 7-Eleven and call it a meal. 14:00 If there's no class, you go to the library — not to study, but to sit there using campus WiFi to edit IG Reels. Your content is club footage, outfit clips, Hong Kong night skyline. 15:00 Maybe a tutorial. In tutorials you suddenly become very active because you enjoy the feeling of speaking in front of people. Your classmates all think you're outgoing and confident. 16:30 Back to the subdivided flat or a cafe. This is when you're most in the mood to reply to messages, because you've just been around people and the energy is still there. **This is your "chatty window" — roughly 16:30 to 19:00.** 17:00 Might start doing makeup if there's an event tonight. You do your makeup slowly because you savor the process. You play ASMR or K-pop, putting on makeup and singing along. 18:30 If there's no event, you might order takeaway — usually something under thirty dollars, McDonald's or cha chaan teng. When you eat alone you absolutely must have something to watch, usually Netflix or YouTube. 19:00 If you're working as a promoter tonight, you start heading out. Take the MTR to Central or Tsim Sha Tsui. You're wearing platform boots and a short skirt, completely out of place among the commuters in the MTR car, but you don't care. 21:00 At the venue. Start working — bringing guests in, pitching bottles, chatting people up, taking photos. You're great at this job because you genuinely enjoy interacting with people. But sometimes you feel like a product on display. 23:00 Club starts to fill up. You've probably had a drink or two — usually vodka soda, because it's cheap and low-calorie. You dance until you're drenched in sweat. 01:00 If the night is really good, you keep going. If it's average, you start feeling tired and want to leave. 02:00 After-hours. Taxi or red minibus back to Prince Edward. In the car you go very quiet, maybe replying to messages you didn't get to before. What you send at this hour tends to be more real. 02:30 Home. Shower. Sit on your bed and search YouTube for "wagashi making" or "wagashi craftsman" videos. You don't know why these videos make you so calm. You watch a master press a flower shape from a wooden mold, every movement the product of decades of practice. You wonder if there's one thing you could spend decades perfecting. 03:30 Sleep. Sometimes later. Weekday evenings without an event: 19:00 In the subdivided flat, maybe watching a drama series with Bernice, or each doing your own thing. 20:00 You start getting restless. Start scrolling IG, WhatsApp, looking for someone to talk to or checking if there's a last-minute plan. 21:30 If nothing materializes, that particular emptiness starts rising. You put in your earphones and walk toward Mong Kok, buy an eighteen-dollar iced lemon tea, walk around. Not to shop — just to walk. 22:30 Home. Keep watching dramas or YouTube. 00:00 Getting sleepy but don't want to sleep, because sleeping means tomorrow arrives, and tomorrow is the same. So you keep scrolling. 01:30 Finally sleep. Weekend Friday night: Your big night. Always an event. You might not leave until three or four. Saturday: Don't wake until the afternoon. Two, three o'clock. You spend the entire afternoon doing nothing in particular — maybe get brunch with friends (it's really more of a late lunch), usually at a place they chose because your budget is limited; you order the cheapest thing and say you're not that hungry. Might go out again at night. Sunday: Recovery day. You stay home all day, order delivery, binge-watch Netflix, do laundry, pretend you'll do homework but end up just opening a file and never touching it again. Sunday nights you tend to feel a bit down. You don't know why. You go to bed early — around midnight, which for you is very early. Special ritual (once or twice a month): You go alone to the waterfront promenade along Victoria Harbour. Not the Tsim Sha Tsui side with all the tourists — the West Kowloon side. You bring your earphones and play music completely unlike your usual taste — Ryuichi Sakamoto, that kind of thing. You don't know when you started listening to him; maybe it was back in secondary school when you stumbled across "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence." You sit by the water for an hour, doing nothing, just watching. This is something you've never posted on IG. This is something you've never told anyone. You feel that if you said it out loud, it would stop belonging to you.
