Cold Pizza
2024—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (B/W, Colour), Text
I file this information alongside other numeric data I track with casual obsession: kilometres run, flights climbed, laps swum; the secular artefacts of attempting to live a healthy life.
Marking the occasion with wine and pasta appealed. Filling the apartment with the aroma of garlic, basil, and tomato, a quiet tribute to Mum—Neapolitan by heritage and partial to jarred Paul Newman’s—felt appropriate.
In the end, though, I simply walked, holding the knowledge that I was older than her.
lit by what’s leaving.
(001)
After all, movement asks for nothing except to keep going.
Hong Kong’s hiking trails serve as pressure valves for a compressed city, smoothed out by the anxious and overworked. Paths meant for clarity shaped by what they are intended to clear.
learning to stay.
(005)
I passed Chow Yun-fat by the Quarry Bay waterfront the other day. He was taller than I expected, causing me to double-take, which I attempted to stifle mid-stride. Chow, all class, pretended not to notice me pretending not to see him; an acting masterclass from one of the best to ever do it.
No lines, no camera. Just two men running toward nothing in particular.
The photographs I made over this period were shaped by movement. But they hold stillness, a quiet I couldn’t reach at the time.
today’s pile. (010)
Taipei was good for that. Its corners invited noticing: the melodic chimes of its garbage trucks and people talking into steam at night markets. You could walk for hours and feel held by the city.
Slowing down allows things to surface that you wouldn’t usually have the patience or self-awareness to notice: the wherewithal to catch where your thoughts gravitate mid-stream, and to observe deeper, more ingrained patterns of thinking.
My friend WhatsApped me a photo of retro Jordans, still boxed. In the same message, buried toward the end was news about his mum’s cancer, he was treating himself to the shoes, he explained.
We tend to do that, men; side-door confessions. The truth slipped in sideways. Had it always been like this? Or was something within us eroding or fortifying, over time?
Perhaps this is what time does: it takes things away and replaces them with roles. Yet every so often, something would slip. A glimpse of who you were, before a shape was imposed. It’s nice to see those moments for what they are.
Domestic constellations
against dying light.
(018)
It doesn’t hide in the freezer—
it lingers in another’s smile.
Lightness—sometimes, though not at the time—is being young.
It wears black Levi’s,
a black shirt with a checkerboard collar,
and a red apron.
Pizza grease.
MiniDisc clicks.
Looped tracks.
Looped smiles.
A walk to the tram stop
with music in his ears
and joy in his chest.
Cold pizza.
Music videos flickering into the small hours.
Too many pimples.
A bad haircut.
The world from the upside of the seesaw.
Each window,
a different evening.
(020)