If boys were candies, I would save the best ones for you. The sweetest, softest ones.

I want to give you something to look forward to. Something a lot like hope, a lot like love.

There are things I always look forward to. Simple things. I want you to have that too. Things like, late night suppers with friends who are half-asleep in their sloppy t-shirts and secondary school shorts, hair tied up into buns and fringe pushed up roughly with hair bands like a bunch of premature aunties with slightly greasy faces. Everyone breaks into random topics, random sentences, random hokkien and mandarin and malay phrases interspersed by the occasional bombastic word, like “camaraderie”, which causes everyone to look up abruptly and throw their satay sticks at you, “Wah lao. What word was that?!”

“Sorry! It just slipped out!”

“Act cheem. So act cheem. Stop eating bananas lar you.”

Silly, simple things like that. Oh you have no idea. All the things I want to give you, but can't seem to- I am not a man on that galloping white horse you told me about when we were little kids playing with sand, I am an unwitting voyeur.

Kindness, for instance. I want to give you unending kindness. Love in one hand. Laughter in the other. And all the attention in the world. Protection, even, especially, from myself. I want to see you learn how to walk, without having to suffer a single fall.

My dear. You look so much like a child, before you close your uneasy eyes and draw dark black kohl lines on your eyelids, before you colour your lips so they look like blooming blushing buds and then you stare at yourself in the mirror, smile coyly, wink once, just once (once is enough), let those long lashes flutter and fly up and down like butterflies, maybe flirt with yourself a little, play make-believe and mouth fully with your blood red lips, “Why yes, yes I would love to go out with you”, and the transformation is complete.

Beautiful. You are. And lonely. The worse combination.

All dressed up with nothing to do and nowhere to go and no man to love you the way you should be loved, no song to sing and the walls around you closing in on you and you look at yourself wistfully in the mirror, the mirror looks innocently back at you, is that you, is that really you, your eyes turn swollen, bulge from the perpetual lack of sleep, the age starts to reveal itself, your tired skin tries to pry apart the layers of compact powder and porcelain masks and in anger you wipe the lipstick away with the back of your hand, bruising yourself, and you shut the door hard and tight.

It is as though god has given you a gift so great, a heart so pure, that you don’t know just what to do with it. So you wrestle with it and you let it smash into you and everything breaks and breaks and breaks and you cry and crumble into ruins.