“We split up on April Fool’s Day. So I decided to let the joke run for a month. Every day I buy a can of pineapple with a sell-by date of May 1. May loves pineapple, and May 1 is my birthday. If May hasn’t changed her mind by the time I’ve bought thirty cans, then our love will also expire.”
Twenty-eight years have passed since Cop 223’s can of pineapple expired in the Wong Kar-wai romantic mystery classic Chungking Express. The 1994 film set in Hong Kong tells the stories of two cops who thought they lost everything after being left by their girlfriends but unknowingly found a new understanding of love and loss from the people they met along the way, while still in a daze of heartbreak.
To many fans of Wong’s films like myself, May 1 is almost like an anniversary. As the clock struck midnight on May 1, 2022, the can of pineapple expired again and I wondered if Cop 223 was one step closer to his closure. I wonder if, instead of letting their “love” expire, he is able to let his obsession over what is lost expire and embrace a fresh start.
May 1 could be the day that marks finality. But it could also be the day that signifies new possibilities that would not have existed had it not been for the end. No one likes being left alone and the feeling of being deemed expired and replaced by newly produced cans is really horrible. But rather than wallow in the back of the shelf like an expired can of pineapple ready to be thrown away, try to be the pineapple. Stand tall and see things from a different angle and you will realize there is always a reason certain things happen. You are only expired if you allow yourself to be.
Everything has an expiration date and nothing lasts forever, but you can choose to remember the good. Just like what Cop 223 said after a woman who knew him for less than six hours wished him a happy birthday, “if my memory of her has an expiration date, let it be 10,000 years.”