maya. seventeen. you are, by every measurable metric, the funniest person i know. i love you a chaotic amount. you know how i said i was "fine" the week the girls in form 4 were being weird to me at lunch? you knew, immediately, that i was not, in fact, fine. you texted me at 11.42pm on a tuesday "jess what is actually going on" and i sat in my room and cried for forty minutes and then i typed out, in seventeen separate messages, the entire thing. you read all seventeen. you replied with "okay. tomorrow. starbucks at Causeway Bay. 4pm. i will be there." you were there. at 3.51pm. with a vanilla latte already on the table because you knew, without asking, which one i would order. that is, by some margin, the kindest thing anyone has done for me in this whole school. happy seventeen, my best friend. the butterfly clips are in my bag for the photo. don't be late. ♡ ♡ ♡
Maya
maya. seventeen. the year butterfly clips came back and we ALL agreed on it. one wall, one chrome moment, every person who has loved her since the SARS-era playground.
for Maya ♡
MAYA!!!
okay so. you know how we said no big party because you said "i literally just want hotpot at the 7-Eleven on Russell Street and like four people who are normal" — we did that. but i also, secretly, made this for you. it is, by some margin, the prettiest thing i have ever made on a laptop at 2am in the dorm at HKU.
i put butterfly clips in your hair when we were eight on the playground at Causeway Bay Government Primary. i held your hair back the first time you cried about a boy at fourteen behind the Mannings. i held your hair back the SECOND time at fifteen. i am, on the morning of july 15, putting the butterfly clips back IN, for the photo, because we said we would, and because seventeen feels like the year we actually start being people.
"that is so fetch." — Gretchen Wieners, Mean Girls, 2004, our annual rewatch tradition that you said, at twelve, would be our "forever thing," and which we have, against the odds and against my better judgement, kept every single year since.
happy seventeen, my best friend. the wall is yours. the chrome is yours. the year is yours. ♡ Jess
everyone for Maya
♡ pinned entries first ♡ the rest in the order they came in.
MAYA!!! you are the COOLEST big sister at school and EVERYONE knows it. olivia in p4 asked me if you would do her hair for her school photo and i said "i will ASK" and you said YES and now she thinks i am the coolest p4 in the WHOLE SCHOOL. thank you forever. also i borrowed your holographic butterfly clip without asking last tuesday and i am, formally, telling you now. i put it back. mostly. it is in my pencil case. i will give it back on saturday. PROMISE. i love you the MOST. happy birthday. there is a card under your pillow that mama doesn't know about. — phoebe xoxoxo
maya. four months. i wrote this three times. you have, in four months, taught me that there is a correct way to pour soy sauce on rice (a small circle, not a splash), that the third floor of fashion walk is, for reasons i still don't understand, "the wrong floor," and that the photo booth in the basement of times square at midnight on a saturday in june is the best photo booth in hong kong. you are right about the soy sauce. you are right about the floor. you are right about the photo booth. happy seventeen. — marcus
MAYA!! 17!!! it is chlo from vancouver writing this at 3am because the time difference is, as usual, a disaster. i miss you a stupid amount. last summer when i came back for two weeks and we spent the whole tuesday at the pacific coffee on lockhart road talking about NOTHING — that was, by some margin, the best afternoon i have had since i moved. the butterfly clip i sent in the post for your birthday is the holographic one i was wearing in the photo from f5 sports day, in case you don't remember. you said, at the time, "chlo if you ever, EVER, do not want that clip anymore, you have to give it to me. it is in the contract." you have, technically, never written down the contract. i am, regardless, honouring it. love love love. wear it. send me the photo. — chlo
maya-baby. seventeen. i am writing this from the depop studio in tiong bahru at half past nine on a wednesday and i have, on the desk in front of me, a small box that is on its way to you by sf express containing: ONE (1) authentic 2003 von dutch trucker hat in pink, ONE (1) baby phat butterfly belt buckle (slight wear on the back, i was honest in the listing), and THREE (3) butterfly hair clips in lavender, mint, and holographic. these are not, before you ask, from the shop's stock. these are from my personal archive. the von dutch was, technically, mine in 2009 when i was in primary 4 and stole it from your auntie's closet. it is, on the morning of july 15, formally yours. wear them all at once. that is the point. that is the entire point of the 2003 closet. take a photo. put it on the close friends story. tag the shop if you're feeling generous, don't if you're not. — bea jie jie ♡
MAYAAAA 17!!! okay this is hannah from k-pop class at studio danz, in case you are reading this with too many tabs open and forgot which hannah. (i am the one with the bangs. the OTHER hannah quit in march.) three years of saturday mornings in the same mirror. you are, by some distance, the best dancer in the class who is NOT formally training (which is, frankly, an insult to the rest of us, who ARE formally training and have to work twice as hard to be half as crisp on the chorus). the new (g)i-dle choreo we have been working on since april is, in my serious opinion, the best routine the studio has done this year, and you are the reason. the bridge — the part where we drop to the floor on the "down down down" — was YOUR idea. teacher emma still pretends it was hers. she knows. we know. happy 17. saturday morning is still our slot. — han ♡
亞 Maya 仔 — Por Por 寫. (Jess is helping with this one because Por Por's English is, in her own words, "only the words for the menu and the words for the prayers." Jess is translating from Cantonese. Por Por says: write it down exactly. Do not, on any account, make it nicer than I said it.) Por Por says: 阿 Maya, you were the smallest baby I have ever held. I held you for the first time in the upstairs bedroom of the flat in Sham Shui Po, on a Tuesday in July 2009, and I said to your mother, in Cantonese, "this one is going to be the bossy one." Your mother laughed. She did not, at the time, believe me. She believes me now. Por Por says: I have lived for seventy-eight years and I have, in those years, learned that a girl who is seventeen and who has a grandmother who loves her, and a mother who worries about her, and a best friend who builds her a wall on a laptop at two in the morning, is a girl who is going to be fine. Por Por says: You are going to be fine, 阿 Maya. Eat the congee. Wear something warm under the chrome top. Come and see Por Por on Sunday. There is fai chun on the door. 生日快樂, 我的孫女. — Por Por 寫. (Jess has stopped translating. End of letter.)
我的女儿 my Maya — Mama writing. seventeen. i cannot believe i am writing seventeen. you were three pounds when you were born, two weeks early, in queen mary hospital at 4.17am on a tuesday, and you slept on my chest for six hours and the nurse said "this one is going to be a small one and a fast one" and she was, on both counts, right. i know you said no party. i know you said "mama please, no aunties, no speeches." we will have no aunties and no speeches. but jess has, with my permission and a small amount of help from your father, made you this. read it slowly. there is congee in the rice cooker. drink the soup before the bibingka. wear something warm if you and jess are going out after — the AC in the MTR is, as ever, set for north pole conditions and i am, as ever, worried about your throat. phoebe is, against my better judgement, in the kitchen unsupervised and there is, presumably, a small amount of damage. it is fine. she made you a card. it is, in her own assessment, "very good." i love you very much, my girl. — Mama
NO BUT SERIOUSLY LISTEN, THIS IS GOING TO BE THE YEAR
Share this wall