In Continuum.

Badly Drawn Boy

Cold, cold water
Surrounds me now
And all I've got
Is your hand

There is a boy, a badly drawn boy, living in the not-so remote corner of an island called Singapore. He calls himself a badly drawn boy, because you cannot put his picture next to a work of art and then praise the picture over the framed masterpiece. There is something missing on his face, and to make it worse - something additional too. He never was able to pin-point his flaw, nor has he ever bothered to save for the few minutes he spend everyday before the bathroom mirror, with the condensation still fresh upon the cool surface and the image blurred and distorted. There must be something wrong with me, he thinks to himself each morning. But as the time ticks down towards the time he has to leave the house for school, he turns his attention away from all the bustling in his head and to the more important issues at hand.

His name is Will, and Will is his name. This Tuesday morning, unlike any other mornings, it rained like it never did before. He stood at his bedroom window and listened to the moaning of the wind against the dusty glass, and wondered who came up with the phrase "It's raining cats and dogs!" He carefully disheveled his hair before the mirror, checking for areas of his hair that he missed, and then he looked himself over in the full length mirror. Everything looked OK, save for the storm brewing in the distance. He wondered about the road to school, and how the gloom of his room was the best time to cuddle in the warmth of his blankets. He contemplated, and played with the idea of not going to school today, to just fall asleep for the rest of the morning and the afternoon. After all, a nice rainy morning is the best reason there is to skip a class right, right? No, of course not. No. He didn't want boredom to overwhelm him again, no more 'Dear Sunday' entries, for when boredom strikes, one's mind falters. And that is what happened last Sunday, when it took over and mercilessly brought his world down.

He exploded out of his front door with his mother, who offered to give him a ride to the train station before dropping his father at the airport. The wind stopped blowing as strong as before, but the rain came down harder and harder. They say that when a storm blows, a great person must have died in the quiet hours of the night. But because of the lack of concerns by others in that hour, the mournings were replaced by the howling of the winds in the morning. So that is what happened, as Will stood at the lift lobby and surveyed the gray world before his eyes, as the falling rain created a veil before his eyes, as ticklish rain fell on his face and teased the idea of staying in once more.

Lord, can you hear me now?
Lord, can you hear me now?
Lord, can you hear me now?
Or am I lost?

The train ride to school felt the same as every other day's. All the courtesy taught to us as children were flushed down imaginary toilets as the people all rushed to get onto the train, afraid that it would drive away without them at any second. People shoved, people pushed, and people smelled bad on the train itself as they all tried to gain an inch more of standing space. Will wondered if the smell was merely a weapon adopted by some inconsiderate idiot to fight for a standing space in train carriages. But the rain continued to fall, and the Heavens refused to lift the gray veil from the world. It was such a beautiful morning in a melancholic way, and Will only thanked the skies silently in his heart for not having the rain fall any earlier than the morning. Had it fallen at night, his mood would've been drastically different. After all, that kind of weather gets to people don't they? The rainy kind, the stormy kind, the nostalgic kind.

During the music class in the morning, nobody bothered to pay much attention. Everybody just wanted to get the early class over and done with. Soon, the noise that Will was hearing became a dull noise in the background, repeating over and over again like a broken record player. His eyes were threatening to close shut, and his eyelids were out of his mind's control then. The time crawled, like the progress bar of a download through a 56k modem. Despite the teacher's lively attitude towards the nonchalant class, it wasn't enough to wake him up from his wakeful slumber. He wanted to run away from the classroom, run away from the crowd of strangers, then fall asleep under the first tree he finds in the rain and never wakes up. But there he was - Will - trapped in the narrow classroom with the same narrow people, talking nonstop about the most narrow things. He was suffocating himself slow, the mundane and routine life of his almost felt regimental. He needed a breather, a good one. Because this brave new world with strange new people no longer have the ability to distract him from those thoughts any longer.

In his blue sweater, Will likes to keep his hands to himself. He puts them in his front pockets, and he felt the rain water seep slowly through the layers of fabric and onto his bare skin. They felt like cooling points of ice, melting away on his warmed skin. But the skin above, reflected not of his emotions but the ones that belonged to his cold cold heart. Will stood at the edge of the bus stop and waited for his ride home, all the time looking at the puddle of discharged oil on the tarmac in the bus bay. The way it floated the puddles of water, reminded him of fallen rainbows from the sky that crashed into the water puddles in the rain and became distorted and broken. But still, the retained the color that once was, the color that people admired in the skies after the rain. But the rain, the rain kept falling in the later hours of the morning, and as the music played in Will's ears the itch in his eyes started up again. He started tearing, and no matter how much he tried to wipe away the tears with the back of his arm, they just kept falling in the unnoticed corner of the bus stop. Stop this you idiot, there is more to life than to tear in the middle of a bloody bus stop, he told himself. So he stopped, but the rain never seized to fall.

No one's daughter
Allow me that
And I can't let go
Of your hand

On the bus ride home, the bus driver accused Will of not paying the fare. But he did, and because he scanned the card - just in case - after he arrive at the next stop, Will managed to enjoy the rest of the ride with just the amount of fare needed to travel between two stops. That little loophole was undiscovered by the suspicious driver throughout the journey, as he kept his close watch on Will through the rear-view mirror. But Will cared little about the stares, but only the drenched scenery on the outside. It was all too familiar in an eerie way, with the couples hiding in the shelter of their umbrellas, shielding themselves from the onslaught of the rain. Will smiled, but that smile was short-lived as he tried to adjust the air-conditioning above. But the plastic grill above was stuck, and he was too lazy to change seats. So he cuddled himself in some more, with his arms crossed before his chest as he fell into an uneasy sleep on the shaky bus - cold.

Will hates puddles, and despite the curious stares of the construction workers in the shelter of the tin-roofs, he tip-toed through the muddy waters that plagued the pavements along the construction site, and found his way to the top of the concrete curb. He made sure that each foot landed right on top of each concrete slab, with every left foot landing on the black ones while the right foot landing on the white ones. He must have looked funny, the way he carefully threaded his way on the curb that way after the rain, as the workers from distant countries looked on in amusement and spoke under their breaths in strange tongues. But Will cared too little for their stares and their accusations, all the while trying to distract himself from frightful memories of the past, of that fateful day when he was caught in the rain with somebody else, the night when the rain fell the hardest in the history of Singapore last December.

Will skipped on the curbs, avoiding the muddy puddles that came into his path. He was reminded of a poem he wrote long ago for a girl that he liked. But that was a long time ago, as mentioned, and that was in a time when everything was so innocent, so pure and clear. There was a certain sort of clarity in the air then, like the air of the world after a storm - like the morning when he came home. The poem was about a boy in his yellow raincoat, picking up colorful pebbles from the puddles to give to a girl that he likes that lives in the neighborhood. She dresses in pink all the time, and likes to blow bubbles in her garden, all the while dancing in her bright red shoes.

But there were no colorful pebbles in the puddles, as Will looked on in dismay. It was just the ugly looking metal plates underneath his shoes, the temporary ones due to the construction, and the dirt that floated upon the oily surfaces everywhere. It was repulsive, like the love that he once had. Tainted and stained, ugly and brutal. It was too raw for his taste, and as he unlocked the back gate of his estate after a maze-like walkway, Will realized that he was back in the center of all his memories, the root of all evil so to speak. He was back at the very start, square one, and as he stared upon his own apartment building - a stark contrast to the brightening skies beyond - there was a moment of exhaustion and a feeling of weakness.

Will gave in to his memories, and allowed them to float back into his head. He was back in the same suffocating room and in front of the same suffocating computer. The same songs played, and he hummed to himself in the last attempt to distract himself once and for all. But all songs end, and that three minutes and thirty seconds of selective amnesia is not enough to let go of the past.

Until the next morning, until tomorrow morning. He told himself. Just survive till the next round of distractions in school, then everything will be OK, everything will be fine. But what about Friday night, and the weekend? And then the hours after, and then the hours after that? The walls closed in on Will as he sat in his darkened bedroom, the same old bedroom that the memories were created, and the same one right now that has memories bouncing off the four walls. They closed in, and in the middle of it all, Will started on a blog entry, about himself. In hopes of releasing his love, his anguishes, his frustrations. But is it working? Is it working at all?

Lord, can you hear me now?
Lord, can you hear me now?
Lord, can you hear me now?
Or am I lost?

Am I lost with you?
Am I lost with you?
Am I lost with you?