To be tender was to blind oneself to universes of hurt. That much I got from my meeting with Boon Leong, fresh from his last finance job and looking every inch of what he did out of junior college, with his limbs poking out of his unironed white shirt in all the wrong places, held together seemingly by sheer force of will and unending doses of fish oil. He had always been the first to reach out to us in moments of our greatest vulnerability, without nary a cue from any of us. It was like a kind of superpower. Over lunch at a chicken rice restaurant our boss had treated us to during our internship days, I told him about all the ways my life had gone wrong.

"It's true I haven't kept in touch with the group for a while," I said. "Sometimes I feel like a different crowd entirely. Sometimes I feel like I haven't got a crowd at all."

He was as understanding as he always was. Boon Leong had a way of listening to you with his head bowed such that he always seemed to be looking up at you, underlining your field of vision with his skinny face. It made you feel seen but not like you were being overbearing. His words cleaved close to my skin: "Do you feel like you need one?"

"Not particularly," I said. "Maybe that's just part of growing up? Everybody's saying it ever since graduation, but it's incredibly hard to believe."

"That sounds like the consensus might be wrong. A few people report that something is wrong with their lives, but the problem's not real because it doesn't fit into the sociomedical consensus. It's just like my Morgellons diagnosis."

He had been struggling to get treated for his diagnosis for years. His doctors did not think that it was a real disease, and thought he was trying to import a culture war. There were tiny lesions up and down his arm. He showed me close-ups of his fingernails on his iPhone: army-green fibres, micrometres in length, were growing spontaneously from his nail beds.

"I think everything that you are saying is true," he said. "I don't think you're wrong at all."

I nodded. He was immersing a little bit of himself in the space in order to cede it. I felt my worries expanding into a kind of damp pool from where my elbows touched the table. The clamminess held in the air between us, momentarily relieved but not defused. Part of me wondered why I was telling him this, as if he would have a solution in mind.

"It's patronising to suggest getting a hobby, but I think you have some really cool interests that others would be interested in," he said. "I'm sure you'll run into people who share in the same worldview as you."

This elicited a smile from me. "Singapore's a small city, right?"

"I think you can look at it that way."

Did he have a crowd? We had always thought of him as kind of a socially-efficient loner. He felt himself into spaces where he clearly did not belong, then acted like he belonged the whole time, which made people gravitate to him anyway. I tried to imagine him holding space at a cafe, or a bar. Talking shit with ex-colleagues. Playing board games with a bunch of covid-trapped expatriates.

"Do you hang out with anyone?" I asked.

"Outside of work, sure. I don't think that's mappable to your problems anyway. Why, were you thinking of the kind of crowd I could fit into?"

I found I could only think of the fibres extruding from his fingers. Where had he picked up such a thing like that? The image of them slowly building up beneath his skin, accumulating below the layers of muscle and fat, brushing up against his very bones, and then bursting from his skin in little invisible blossoms—it was difficult to bear imagining. I choked on my chicken rice very hard and spat out an indigestible green thread of parsley.

He stared at me patiently. "I have water if you need."

I waved him back, gargling down my iced barley. "It's okay, it's okay."

"I think thinking about where you fit begins with the body," he said. "You have to think about where your body fits inside yourself first. Really come to ease with yourself. I think that's something fundamental that a lot of Singaporeans are lacking."

"Is that why guys tend to hit the gym after army?"

He laughed. It put me at ease. I continued to eat, partitioning out smaller chunks of chicken breast with my spoon and fork, setting them out on the side of the plate that was not contaminated by that half-chewed ball of rice. Boon Leong had been talking so much that he had barely touched his meal at all.

I continued: "Maybe you're right, though. Maybe this is me looking back at where loneliness sits with my body, and realising it's different from all the other times other people have talked about loneliness. There isn't really a 'crowd' or 'not-crowd' to speak of, what matters is the stuff inside you being comprehensible to the people around you. And I'm having some trouble with incomprehension. Can that make sense?"

He grabbed me by the hand.

"I need help," he said, and his eyes were very wide. "Do you feel like bodies matter? Tell me, are you put at ease by the presence of bodies around you?"

I wanted to give him an accomodating answer, I really did. But the restaurant was empty; we were the only patrons; and the only body I was aware of (if at all) at the table was mine alone, spreading out and dripping over the edges, seeping into the fibrous carpet beneath my feet, as tightly-packed as the thing that wrapped around my wrist, hanging on densely, leaving no further room for absorption at all.