In Continuum.

*

Two dollars and forty-nine cents left in my transit card, I desperately needed a top up somewhere. It was Friday afternoon, it was Friday afternoon and an empty stomach. People were out partying, enjoying themselves, strolling around with their girlfriends and boyfriends, thanking God that it was a Friday, cursing the coming of the following Monday. Everybody had something to do, everybody had somewhere to go. I, well I had a MRT station to head towards, I had a transit card to top up. As far as I was concerned, it was as good as a party on a Friday evening after school, and I was genuinely excited about it. Long bus trips home, meeting unknown people on the buses and the trains, falling in love for fifteen minutes at a time and then moving on with life as we get off at different stops or onto different platforms. Last Friday was the first time in a long time since I had any time for myself, just those long boring trips on a public transportation, feeling silly all over again.

There must be some reason why they still keep non-air-conditioned buses around, running alongside spanking new buses imported from various European countries - was it Belgium or Germany? The smell of gasoline in the passenger cabin wouldn't go away at times, and the smell sinks into your shirt after a while and wouldn't go away. The wind that comes through the windows turns your hair into a great bundle of reckless joy, and you eat the poisonous gas from the exhaust pipes. But I like sitting on these buses, despite everything. I like the third last seat from the back, where the seat is positioned in such a way that I can stick my elbow out of the window and rest comfortably with my back against the seat. It is the perfect seat, to watch the rest of the world go by outside along with the wind. When it rains, it'd splatter into the bus and wet my sleeves, or sometimes a row of trees would go by and slap against my skin. But that's the way I like it, that's the way it happened that Friday evening.

I started having strange thoughts at the platform while waiting for the train to arrive. I imagined how it would be like to by lying on the tracks as the train arrives, how it'd be like to have those thick iron wheels run over my limbs and body. I wondered if any one of those loving couples standing to my left and to my right would risk their lives to rescue me, if they'd be willing to chance the possibility of losing each other forever for the sake of a stranger like me. It was a silly thought, a thought that I entertained for a split second. It must have been the bug catching up with me, the love one, just when you need a good old can of insecticide. I remember the mosquito coils they used to sell in the minimart back in camp, the purple ones that came with a primitive metal stand for you to bring outfield. The green ones were more effective, but they smelled like a hellish blend of dirty socks and rotten yoghurt. The purple ones were my favorite, because they brought with them the scent of lavender, like spring. But they were pretty useless against those commando mosquitoes, but I was the only person that liked those lavender-scented mosquito coils. They brought along peace, and such a striking irony between that and the rest of the vehicle, which laid in utter ruin and chaos. I miss those useless mosquito coils, along with a lot of other things. If only warding off the love bug brings along the same kind of peace, the same kind of beauty. I guess, in real life, things just don't work that way. The train pulled in, I boarded the train, the sliding doors was closed, next thought began.

He must be a hot shot amongst his friends, the rookie from the school team, the lover to his lover. Tanned skin and spiked-up hair, broad shoulders and thick upper arms. His jaw muscles rotated underneath his skin as he chewed on a piece of gum. He was seated next to his partner, who was then sitting next to the plain of glass next to the doors. She was an ordinary girl, almost too ordinary. But then they always score with the hot shots, they always score with the rookies. They tend to like the girls next door, the kind that loves their fathers and mothers, the kind that treats Valentine's Day as the only day worth celebrating in a year, the kind that treats you as everything in their world. But they looked like a quote, they looked like a quote from a book I have read before. It was something about lonely people talking to each other can make each other lonelier. I wondered how they were doing it, how they must still be doing it, keeping things alive by not talking to each other at all. The guy had his attention buried in the handheld gaming set, hammering away on the buttons and in a total disregard for the girl next to him. She stared deathly at the screen, making no comments or showing any sign of excitement. They were that close to each other as a couple, that far away. A date out with each other on a Friday evening, and it is somehow reduced to just one person being submerged in a world of games and the other just watching.

If he didn't lend her the game set for a minute there, I wouldn't have thought them to have known each other at all. She took the game set, tried to hammer around with the buttons while the hot shot fell asleep in the seat, his body swaying gently to the moving train. I pictured the girl calling her friends later that night, telling them about how bad the date that evening was, with her boyfriend being more interested in the scantily dressed female warriors than herself. It be a complaint on Friday night, a reason to fight in the weeks to come, a joke in the future. They'd be talking about, they might even argue over it, but right now they seemed calm and content with this distance, this... great distance between the lovers. I wonder if that is how the lovers of my generation are like now, the kind that shares a game set in between them and nothing else. I still hate it when lovers dive into each other and treat buses like their bedrooms and seats like their mattresses. But still, seeing this, it's sad. Whatever happened to the kind of things we'd do between lovers?

A messy thought, a thought interrupted by blurry lines you see in one of those old footage of war or some other documentary, shot on those old school cameras and narrow lenses. No one in particular here, no one in particular anymore. Just the kind of things I used to do with somebody, when we didn't do anything at all. There were no handheld games, no earphones plugged into our ears. Just the game of thumb wars as our hands held tightly to one another's, just the music of each others' breath and heartbeat. Those were beautiful games, those were pretty music. We've already ran out of love letters to write, we've already ran out of chocolates to give in our generation, do we really need to take away the thumb wars and heartbeats as well? The fat man next to me adjusted in his seat, his thick left thigh rubbed against mine and I felted a sudden chill that ran down my spine. The only contact with anybody today, the only warmth I received, was from a many twice my size and sweating like a pig - a man almost as lonely, as me.

The opening to the MRT station looked like a giant white box as I slowly ascended towards the ground level. Then the white box was interrupted by the top of the buildings around, the trees next, the people on the streets, then the sound came flooding in until there was no big white box anymore, just everything else that invaded the white piece of sky. I waited at the bus stop to go home, still fearing the sight of bus number 53. But I told myself, our lives are different now, our courses are never going to meet on this route anymore. It was the kind of bus stop that threatened to squeeze people out onto the road, almost like a suitcase packed by a tearful wife. I was one of them, one of those insignificant wardrobe in the suitcase. A conversation I had with a friend on the previous night came into my head. "Aren't we all so insignificant and unwanted?" she said. Maybe I am her little black dress, maybe I am her imported silk slippers. Maybe I am her tube of toothpaste, maybe I am her favorite book. She is still crying, and she is packing everything into the suitcase too small for everything. But she can't stand the look of her husband standing in the doorway, with a cigarette in his hand and his penis hanging out in between his thighs like a limp fish. "How long is this going to take?" he asks. How long am I going to take?

He must be a clown amongst his classmates, the lover to his lover, the joker to the rest of the people at the bus stop. He was wearing a checkered shirt with the most awful combination of colors. Lines of green, purple, yellow and pink, running over and under each other like a complicated design of a highway viewed from outer space. His pants was in a vulgar shade of lime green, finished off by a purple pair of shoes with little black stars running along his shoe laces like an ugly flag of America. He did indeed look like a joker, a jester of some sort. He was missing a hat with bells on it, he was missing make up to cover up his youthful pimples. His pinky hung on to the girl's, like the hook to the ring on a necklace where the ends would meet. His partner was in her school uniform, she was a student from that high school down the street from my home. That nose stud, she must have put it on in the toilet right after school, to make herself look more attractive and presentable to her young boyfriend, who looked too young even for a pacifier. He looked reluctant, though she was passionate. He pulled away from her, though she leaned closer for a kiss. So the tug of war began silently in between the both of them, when one pushed forward the other one would lean backwards. I found myself hating them already, these plastic mannequins, these dolls.

Then it dawned on me, it dawned on me that it was only envy speaking instead of me. There she was, too young to love, too young for anything in this world really. But at least she held him close to her chest, pulled him closer so the distance wouldn't be too great. At least, at the very least, somebody still knew what to do on a Friday evening, at least somebody still bothered to do what lovers do. A new sense of hope, oddly enough, found in a fourteen year old school girl with a face too young for a nose stud. The joker and his lover, they carefully disappeared into the back of the crowd as the bus pulled away from the bus stop. I stood the rest of the way home, another couple at the back looked a thousand miles away from each other. Her stop came, and she stood up without saying goodbye to him, not a word. The folding doors closed, she buried herself into her cellphone as the bus pulled away, and the boy fell asleep with his head against the window.

"How long is this going to take?", the man with the cigarette asks once more.

I don't know. How long is this going to take?