red

I've only ever seen you drive for a while. Smooth the whole time, so sweet with your left hand over mine. You only ever let go to dance to Black Pink's new song, and you only ever raise your voice when exiting the highway, screaming Drift, drift, drift!

But most of the time, you are reckless on the road as a rider. Drifting in between cars without a care in the world. Going above hundred, knowing that your bike can't quite take it. Holding an angry hand out towards drivers who don't let you pass. Picking up speed to run the amber light, sometimes even going through the red.

I have to admit, your bike might be the only place on earth where I don't trust you. You're not too shy to glare a driver down, even if it sacrifices your attention for the road. I've come to accept that tapping you on your back only makes it worse. That your road rage is almost always cultivated by that split-second fear of another driver's recklessness.

Just today you finally removed your probation plate. Just as you miscalculated and rode off the road and up the kerb, barely missing a traffic light pole. It got a shriek out of me, audible even through the music from my earphones. It took me a while to regain control of my own legs, and I had to ask twice if you were okay, even though my own attention was on the tire tracks through the mud.

It just became another secret to keep from our parents. After your fall on the expressway where you nearly slid under a bus, your mother demanded that you text when you're about to ride off, and when you reach your destination. My mother shows no exception, always asking me out of the blue, Did Faruq fetch you again? Are you always wearing your helmet properly?

It's okay even if you know what you are doing. Even if you are the slowest, safest rider in the country. Despite all that, my own paranoia brings me down. The thought of a wild dog appearing out of nowhere, making you swerve hard to dodge it. Or my loose cardigan getting caught in your tyre, tearing out my arm along with the sleeve.

It's not like we get to talk on the road. If we did, I would constantly ask for your reassurance, to tell me that my paranoia was impossible. You are the logical one, never letting fantasy or imagination get in the way. It doesn't help that your speed and ferocity are just as high, constantly at loggerheads with my own thoughts.

But the few times you do stop at a red light, I am back to knowing you are the safest place in my life. You lean an arm against my knee, a signal that it's safe to hold your hand. To put an arm around your neck and rest my chin on your shoulder, even. You don't have to say anything, just let your voice vibrate through to me when you turn your head slightly to mumble I love you.

I am helpless from behind, a passenger who needs assurance every kilometre. You make it seem so easy to erase my panic just by gripping my hand. Granted, I am unable to do the same for you, only getting in the way of your road rage when I tap your back to move you along. But I will always choose that pause, that hesitance before it picks up speed. I will always choose the brushing of your hand at the red lights, in spite of your recklessness before or after. 

groceries

I have never met a boy who does the grocery shopping for his mother, let alone have a supermarket that he prefers. When you moved out of Pasir Ris, you couldn't rely on the 24-hours Sheng Siong anymore. The one that sits in between your old home and mine, growing alongside us.

When we first started talking, we wondered if we had ever crossed paths unknowingly. Your secondary school was a few blocks away from mine, your old home exactly thirty from mine. If it hadn't been for the condominium, your living room and my bedroom would have been in perfect view of each other.

But I couldn't imagine being in that supermarket at the same time as you. Not when you were always running errands for your mother, while mine only came down on her own or with my niece. Maybe she's the one who has locked eyes with you before; it's a little funny to think about.

Our conversations started as small talk in early June: my mum asked me to get some stuff. They became Do you want to follow me to Sheng Siong or I'll just send you home first? Somewhere along the way I became your companion, helplessly carrying your basket while you run around the aisles, knowing where everything is.

You moved to Sengkang, but the supermarket at the top floor of the nearby mall wasn't good enough. Now that I think about it, how convenient that the girlfriend you send home everyday lives near the one you favour. You trade her backpack for bags of groceries in the box of your motorbike, one last cigarette while she snaps your receipt for a cashback app.

Your mother is so lucky to have you. Three sons, but one of whom knows which aisle the spices are, which potatoes are good, the name of every different leaf. The way you treat your family ignites this little flame in me, from the patience with your grandmother to the obligation to run every favour your mother asks. It's been getting harder to say no to my own mum, just thinking about the 'okay's you give yours.

I am out of place in the supermarket, in my jeans and hundred-dollar sneakers. I never know where everything is, or what half the things on your mother's lists are. But I will always love you for the way you paused one night, passing me your phone instead. Why don't you help me find all these things today? Go, while you pushed me on the small of my back.

I loved you even when you cleared your throat for my missing the coconut milk. Even when you made side-eye while I walked rounds around the aisles looking for sawi. Even when you snickered at me for directly translating laksa leaves to Malay when on the phone with my grandmother.

I am out of place again in your home, comfortable enough to lean all the way back on your bed, but still too nervous to eat with your parents. Too shy to even hand your mother the bags I had offered to carry, too shy to say I'd bought a bottle of her favourite winter melon tea. But it is somewhere along the way that I had chosen the groceries in your box, be they the ones you picked out or the ones I found. 

sidewalk

I told you about my obsession with parallels, first thing when we started talking. You didn't understand my image of a second me walking beneath, her feet mirroring mine. But we met, and you became another piece of my parallels.

You were the man turning twenty-five, the sides of his helmet squeezing his cheeks in. Nearly four in the morning when you deposited me at 606 for the first time, helping me unbuckle the straps around my chin. It was finally the beginning of something new, hugging you until I thought my heart would explode.

I told you about the night barely two months before, when somebody else dropped me off that very sidewalk. He had a bike with him too; an orange dockless one that continued being shared among strangers after he abandoned it at his own void deck. I was in the hoodie that he had just bought me, the very one I'd worn meeting you for the first time.

I went back further eight years before, when I was fifteen and somewhere else you had just started poly. When yet somebody else sent me home on his bike, my white Converse jumping off the pegs by his wheels. In his hoodie this time, a long black one with thin white stripes. It was only then that you understood my parallels; that eventually, you would find your own.

Having you in my routine now gives me extra ten minutes of sleep in the morning, sometimes twenty. You refused to let me go work by myself as long as you could still send me. So there you always were, scrunching up your face beneath your helmet as way of waving. You always come when I least expect it, making a U-turn at the vacancy of the lot before stopping right in the shade.

Sometimes you wore glasses, lens when you had to be somewhere else afterwards. Sometimes you would have packed lunch for me, with an egg that your mother rushed to fry while you were in the shower. And sometimes, once in a blue moon, you would be soaked from the rain, your maroon pants turning dark red.

I had hoped you would be the last person I'd see on this sidewalk. The last person I would wave goodbye to until out of sight. The last person I would wrap my arms around and kiss. It's been more than two months since you started dropping me off at 608 instead, but it was enough for me to choose the arms that lifted me off the old sidewalk, stones pressing against our chests.

marble

Two blocks from mine, to avoid the prying eyes of my older brother or father coming home from work. Your bike against the parallel yellow lines, with the spare helmet placed haphazardly on the edge of the seat.

There used to be another couple sitting on the ledge of 607, but we outlasted them. Maybe they broke up, or maybe they were platonic friends who found other people. Or maybe they just got bored of the mediocre view, the ordinary parking lot with hardly any wind.

In the beginning we sat on the kerb, where we had to keep shielding our eyes from the sudden headlights of cars turning in. Confusion and an identity crisis, when I told you not to fetch me from work like you usually would. But you showed up, a shadow on the ground before you pulled my shoulder and spun me around.

We talked it out, something I wasn't very familiar with. The argument closed when we leaned in to kiss, and the moment ended when a cockroach scurried past, along the kerb and somewhere among the grass.

Over time the marble table at 608 became ours. I have never seen anyone else sit there, not since we made it routine. Not even the one time I confidently declared out of the blue: I have a feeling that someone is sitting at our table right now.

But like magic after every trip to the minimart near my primary school, there it waits. There are always new cigarette butts around it, probably the only sign the table has of other occupants. Sometimes an empty pack or two is abandoned on it, prompting me to snort with disgust.

I will always sit facing the end wall, with you on my right. Your best friend joined us once; he had to sit opposite me. On another night, two of your secondary school friends visited, one of whom started smoking with you. I stood my ground despite the smoke wafting towards me, being seated between you two. This is my seat, I had whined like the 1995 kid I was to you guys.

The marble has seen enough of us, guests or no guests. From laughing at videos on Twitter to playing games we discovered from ads on Instagram. It's watched us down our lychee tea and milk coffee only a hundred times, while we rushed to decide the minute to leave.

Sometimes I liked to imagine the tiles of the chessboard holding pieces of our conversations. A black tile for the time we insisted on our own definitions of a 'half day'. A white for the time we talked about our fathers and their different ways of discipline. Another chipped tile for the night we sat there in silence, neither refusing to give in.

At the end of the night we always have to let go. It's never our home, this lonely table at this quiet void deck. When we're gone, or even before we frequented it, who knows the habits its occupants have. Who knows if there's some other couple or lonely old man out there who loves this sadness like I do.

Yet at the same time, I know each time I leave I never look back longer than I have to. A two-seconds glance just to make sure we haven't left anything behind, and that table will be off my mind until the next time you fetch me from work. Until the next time we are lost and have nowhere else to drink.

You have one last smoke, while I am already on my playlist, one bud hooked over an ear. You finish your cigarette, then the last bit of your tea before you dump our bottles into the recycling bin. I get up from your still bike, watch you strap on your helmet and get on it.

I balance along the edges of the kerb while you follow me on your bike, until we finally have to split paths. True that I will never once look back at it, but it is always then that I choose the marble table over which we talk, about the past eight hours and their little tests.