To a boy, aged 16

I was reading your old blog posts, all the way from your Secondary Four days. It was a strange feeling that, peering into the consciousness of a boy so foreign, with woes and joys that appear to be from a different sphere, and yet so familiar, like the smell of bread on your skin, that I could not help but be overcome by a wrenching desire to be there at those moments in time. This you, who had not yet come into my life, I too want to protect from life’s vagaries.

It is as if I got know you all over again, maybe not you, but the clay that would become you. I watched intently as you were slowly and painfully molded into shape by life’s skillful (and cruel) hands. And how she betrayed you sometimes! She who gave you the ability of love gave you too much, and soon these excesses morphed into duty, guilt and a punishing conscience who picked fights at every turn. Great love, unchecked and unrequited, becomes monstrosity, a death-hungry Cerberus, day after day, gnawing down your bones and dignity.

I suppose it should disgust me, watching you sweat out your cold turkey, the bloodshot eyes, the puke, the pornos, the loser behavior, the desperate need for attention, the blood-thirsty vengeance, the insensitivity, the selfishness, the immaturity, the boy crying for validation the only way he knows how. You were a bastard perhaps, but as I journeyed with your past I couldn’t help but notice how beautifully you thanked people for going out with you, how passionately you organized class outings, how desperately you wanted friendships to last. Of course, you were disappointed again and again, and my heart sank each time rejection brought you closer to hell’s door, where the devil’s fires blaze anew.

I know how hard you fought it. This constant oscillation between hope and despair would stop, if only you could time life’s pendulum swing. Yet she is a saboteur, each time she sends you up the pedestal, each time she brings the weight crashing down on the return trajectory. But you never did gave up, and your cheeriness pains me, as some god, who knowing what will pass, must see the celebration before the Trojan horse.

I saw a Vincent, struggling, to paint his first work of art. Every time he sets his brush on the canvas, someone comes along and begs him for help with their own. He always obliges, believing that these seeds of good he sows would someday bloom into prescient flowers he will water colour. Yet as the months go by and no flowers come, he sits like the Beast guarding the last petal. Resentment tempts him deeper into misanthropy. He cuts off his ear, stops listening. He becomes a gargoyle, and embraces the grotesque. But all those who shudder are deceived. He is a Prince, and he waits, for that moment before the last petal falls.

Knowing this, what can my response be, other than love? You think I mock you, by frolicking with a persona you want to forget. But this curiousity is love. Love that is strengthened by the intense desire to know all, see all and from that knowledge be remade again to take new forms, as new crystals metamorphosed from old rocks. Love hard enough to bolster and yet tender enough to cajole, sooth and whisper. I love you because you are poetry; you in your nature will always play slave to the dictates of love, victim to emotion’s raging tempests, and servant to the noblest ideals. You are humanity that I cannot be, humanity that I cannot write, humanity that repels yet when I’m at my least conscious, reels me in.

I feel like I’m caught in a time bubble that floated, unwittingly, into this kaleidoscope of colours you call your past. No words travel, but the transparent walls vibrate with each upheaval, and I feel shaken, though cloistered still by time’s impossible barrier. Helplessly I call your name, willing that those eyes would find mine and be comforted, willing that you could be happy now, for tomorrow. I want to hug, reassure, but fate demands you make the pit stops. Oh if only one could know! If we only knew then that we were not alone in this struggle with a relentless world. If we only knew that this relentless search should one day find harbor at the bays of the present. If only we knew, we could have comfortably lay down, made peace with life, and better savoured the days till July 2005.

Where have you been these 17 years? And where was I?