I remember you were trapped in four walls and making for yourself a room inside a room. Newspapers, Sheng Shiong bags, and the pages of your old exercise books made up the walls. I came over as soon as you had called, on foot after dark to avoid the safe distancing officers. With plastic strung around our waists, we entered it without a sound.

To call it wreckage would be too unkind. Beyond the threshold was a hallway, made on the inside of the same stuff. There was tape everywhere. Looking down, we were treading on your Chinese worksheets, which you had never managed to complete and eventually never managed to file.

Past your bed, you kept going. Into the wall I followed, of course. I did not know where was the far wall of the space you had made. We passed through sedimented layers of past year papers and gift cards. Receipts slapped at my face. There was you, your drawings of yourself, crayon scribble, round face with stick legs. After a while, you stopped holding my hand.

We kept going until the light through the thin walls reminded us that it was dawn. The other end was nowhere in sight. Neither were you, any more, a receding speck in the distance of yourself.