1.

The monkey man cradles my head in his lap.

You're not real, I sob.

Neither was the bad thing that happened to you, he purrs.

2.

To heal from imaginary trauma, you need an imaginary therapist.

All those nights dreaming it wouldn't happen to me, until it did.

The monkey man runs a clinic in Lower Bukit Timah, on the antipode of the hill.

I pay the inverse of property tax, he says, when asked about the rent.

3.

We run through some full body exercises.

He swoops through the trees and I follow the way his arms swing.

We peel bananas by the quarryside, blunt end first. We chuck the peels into the lake.

I learn to copy his gleeful, cryptic gait.

4.

On a couch of twisted vines I ask him what happened to all the other monkey men.

Is there a monkey woman?

He grows silent for a while, in a way that suggests measured carelessness.

People want what they think they want from the invert wild, he says.

Some of us just want a jungle father.

5.

Growing confident, I return to society for days at a stretch.

I smile and nod at men. I do not flinch at doors.

Aunties and secondary school children whip out their smartphones and laugh.

Before dusk, I return to the monkey man's clinic, panting.

We can't change that which hurts us, he whispers.

But we can always change ourselves.

6.

Obscurity, I learn, is what saves us from extinction.

The last banana bread in the buffet tray is also the one that nobody touches.

Cryptids and people work quite the same way. All legends are the paiseh piece.

That is why they also live forever.

He makes me work on my signalling, raise my arms, hoot my name.

Monkey, monkey, I repeat.

Psychologically, I am becoming room-temperature bread.

7.

When I've forgotten the last of my trauma, the monkey man gives me a certificate.

You'll remember me when the time comes again, he says.

He passes me his therapist business card. I take CDC vouchers too, he says.

In my excitement, I start to turn away before he can continue.

When I remember I have to thank him, the only sounds that come out of him are screams.

8.

My skin is clear, and my arms hang low.

I can speak in five dialects and bake good banana bread.

Generosity pours from my skin.

It's so much to be human, and it's never enough.