PadfootPatronus

Your Honour, I looked them up to know more about them, to know what I was walking into. I have been accused of stalkerish behaviour, for going through the means that have been made available to me by them! They have spilled their hearts into their machines, like children, naive, so naive, playing the game I will tell you a secret, but you can't tell anybody. My crime today is only remembering what I read, the mundanity of their lives all filed away in my head. Obliviousness should be the crime, Your Honour. They keep sharing the fucking secret, then, lurch when somebody else quotes it back to them.

There it was, the seemingly inconsequential detail, the tiniest pang of disappointment that chipped away slowly, eventually at the pedestal I sat you on. I'd ask you, after, a million times, needing to understand the foreign word, what it meant when they called you 'bai'. Everytime while waiting for you to come to the phone, hearing the echo of your sibling say, 'bai, there's a call for you'. There was something about the way you dogged my question, the sound of your short laugh when you waved it off, I knew then, despite all my naivety of everything else in life, that there was a good chance I'd always remain waiting outside this little door

I speak in run-on sentences, some words of foreign tongue thrown in, thick words, and a thicker lump stuck in my neck. Think I'd have made my point? The run-on sentence makes all the sense to me, more even than the untame thoughts chasing each other in my head. I catch B's eye, the slightly surprised, slightly rueful smile there. B says, "What was that?" I smile back the same rueful smile, shake my head. B considers then says, "I do know that there was something there that only you would say."

I stumbled on a picture of you, of when you were healthy, here. You look beautiful and sombre and certain. You look like you'd have been different from the others. You look like you'd have lent me the strength to stand my ground. I was told, years after, that I looked like you. I think now that those who said it must have missed you dearly and knew that you'd been different from the others, too. Other genes have had their way in me and I don't look beautiful and sombre and certain like you did. All I have of you is a picture now. I have kept safe the only memory I have of you. I had accepted the state of you without question, without emotio

I had stood at the tall, wide windows of our living room once, and imagined how it must look like if the flood came, how it'd be both quick and slow at the same time, how unrelenting it'd be, surging through the maze of houses that lay sprawling behind my own. The waves would be huge, and eerily calm my young self had wondered, if living three stories above the ground would have me saved. I had stood at the tall, wide windows of our living room once, and imagined with much clarity how the flood would take me away, if it did. I'd been hearing adults talk about it over and over. They'd seemed so certain, unafraid, saying the city wo

The strange person from last night's conversation weaves in and out of my dreams, keeps me tossing and turning. I wake, and my chest weighs a few tonnes heavier than before the night, before I dreamt, before I had heard anything said, before, before. I stumble on and talk aloud, drowning out the whisper in my head and the thunder in my heart. But my steps take me, later, eventually, to the cool refuge of the bathroom, and I cry out the muffled, scared cries of someone trapped with a strange person in a crumbling dream.

Where does the past live? In the folds of a musty newspaper. I fold a sheet in half and fold it again, pulling the corners in the centre, shaping a sail. I know the first four steps, I remember how the folds look. Then my hands move as if they suddenly know their way around the folds and paper nooks better than I do. Something subconscious and innocent guides them, a memory from a niche of memories. Heavy rain, paperboats, newspaper soaked, floating feet splashing in pools of the rainwater. Here, Now, 21, I pull on two folds, and watch the paperboat of my childhood of my childhood home spring to life in my hand.

Happiness: state of absorbing yourself so completely in mundane things, it will make you think you managed to block out the pain for a while.   Lust: developing an odd indifference/sudden disinterest to a lifetime of being a certain way, like an uncharacteristic audacity to wander alone on a dark rooftop and not feel afraid of shadows when you catch a glimpse of the sky. Love: the feeling that you can tear yourself away from someone as close to you as heartbeat, to put an end to both your hurt. Love is thinking that maybe distance would be your saving grace.

the clock's steady moving, and I can't be deceived by what my eyes see time's still slower than my heartbeat because my work is, piling and piling and my heart is racing the numbers on my watch now I can't move I'm frantic so there's so much time I had then there is none at all in a room where it ain't going to matter now I'm crumbling I've run out of time now Time was going, going, it's gone now

Your shadow is a very untrustworthy fellow. He's always around but never to have your back. He's dark and lonely and full of things that linger in quiet alleyways (how his shape hurries on the sidewalk, head bowed and hiding). He's made of doubt and hesitation (when he hears footsteps look at the way he turns his head to watch over his shoulder in fear). Being around you he knows what it's like to be alone (he learnt that from you, the way to live as a recluse and stranger among his own kind). Why is it a surprise how much you two are alike? It's when you step away from the warmth of the pale streetlight, and head away, that his fears and do