Love was all we talked about because there was nothing less a young heart
could emulate when it's a balmy summer and you're 17.
I called you on the public phone in front of the schoolyard, the only reason
for the heaviness of an orange purse was the coins I stole from my mother's moneybox; but she was the only person I could fight my teenage awkwardness for, so
I spend some time asking her how she's doing while the other kids created a queue behind me.
The sun, the nervousness, the coins inside my right palm melting with sweat.
We wrote letters as if we weren't met by algorithm of the Internet.
The friendship that grew by streams of posted stamps, notes on receipts, ticket stubs and postcards.
Kids raised by the Internet but held the ways of the deads.
You are shaped by your mould of loneliness.
People approach their loneliness in a peculiar way that shows their degree of separation.
It's like a mark left, scar souvenir.
I wasn't a likeable child, but the kindness that she extended to me
was enough to comfort the unwanted child in me. She takes me to the river, let me scream
while we ride her bike on the way home from school. It was out of pity, but it was
the warmest memory of my
first friend in that strange place.
We shared beds, your grandma liked me, you cooked me comfort dishes.
We sold nasi lemak back then, rambled about boys and prank called them for fun.
My days were fun, only because you were around.
Had I been left in that crooked corner of washed pink walls, I could've grown out a bitter heart.
I could've been so estranged to making friends.
I couldn't have ever near my 20.
Littlest thing around me made me hold on.
You need tangible feelings if you want to hold on.
Those days were hazy of rebellions, I was difficult as much as the
situation was.
Everyone was falling in love and figuring themselves out.
I figured that I wanted to live on the day the school was flooded
and we had to tiptoe on high benches to get through the hallways.
We were doing the stupidest thing when we barefooted through the muddy water (and
we laughed about it like it was normal for the place to be flooded).
Time passes so like balmy summer air. The prickly heat that makes your skin crawl.
In that weirdly-staired classroom, we talked and talked and talked
with the rain drumming the roof above us, like incantations that persuaded me
that we were to become good better people.
As far as we got here, the rain of condensed air is still somehow right.
You were my friend, the tangibility beneath the ruins of who I was.
Kindness.
They tell me angels doesn't really show themselves in their true form
unless with them are responsibilities.
I must find out if it's any true.
