Clocks

"Should I feel bad for feeling nothing; yet wanting something?" He asked as he held me in his arms, as I laid in his embrace, in the living room of his parents house. I did not answer.

It was a hot-ish day in the middle of April. In the cluttered but appropriately so living space of a family I've never met, even the boy, holding me I did not meet till today. Sprawling across the rattan sofa with sun bleached yellow pillows, I in his arms, he holding me. We had been tickling each other for some time now. How long? Well according to one of the four clocks ten giggling moments, another for seven. 

But now, I'm here wrapped in another boy's heat. It mixes with the stagnant weather of a Malaysian sweat, pleasantly discomforted. I start telling a story I don't remember what, probably about my friends that I don't speak to anymore I don't tell him that we stopped talking, but I continue to talk about them. I do not look at him, I look out the glass door, outside the balcony a lush tree suffocates the late afternoon sun between its leaves. The clocks move independently. 

"What are you thinking about" he whispers. I realize I faltered mid-way through my story, I was not thinking, I was just looking at the tree, it's leaves, the light shinning through, the black branches, the blacker shadows. "I'm thinking about nothing." I look up and make eye contact, to prove my truth, to negate any falsehood. Tick tock goes the four different clocks. 

I notice the tiles of the floor tinted slightly grey, but mostly white, the grout fairly clean. I notice the stacks of random objects on the multifunctional, multi-compartmented tv closet cum display beige monstrosity; a vintage relic. It was so full of the most odd things. A price tag, a tape measure, old newspapers, VCRs, a cassette tape, the main compartment was jammed full of books and various other things it couldn't be closed shut. "Thanks for today." I said.

"No worries," 

Thinking back as the clocks tick by, the day was uniquely different from other days of mundane existence in a coastal town where the sun movement and the Moon's rotation cycle without anything happening. Karaoke was fun but lack luster, I couldn't sing, I was flustered, I couldn't muster to scream jagged keys into cheap microphones, next to this guy who could hit notes better, longer, stronger. 

Tea followed soon after, it was an empty coffee shop in the heart of tiny Chinatown, a place that played Chinese music, a place that served tea sweet and the coffee sweeter. He paid for everything, he didn't have to do it. We drove to the beach right after where we climbed rocks placed to stop the beach from eroding, from the sand swashing away, I nearly lost my sandal; he rescued it. He held my hand as he skipped and I tackled the large boulders of granite. I showed him the quartz imbedded in them, I showed him the mica as well. 

Then we are here, in the apartment which the mango tree is shadowing the cluttered living room, me in is arms, his arms around me. Tick tock the clocks struck.