#1:

In secondary 3 my classroom block had -- bear with me here, this is pretty crazy even for a rich school -- it had classrooms joined together by tiny rooms, all air-conditioned, because the whole block was air-conditioned, and the tiny rooms had glass windows and new linoleum-tiled-floors and pretty painted walls in productivity-boosting lime green. The classrooms had pristine white cabinets overflowing with rolls of mahjong paper and coloured markers, cabinets big enough to fit a boy. I don't know what the whole intention was -- bring the learning out of us through interior design, through meeting-room chic? Some of the classrooms even had wooden tables, deviating from the MOE-industry-standard plastic-and-metal desks, smelling like piss and pine oil. Sometimes the tables attracted brown-coloured flies with wide, clear wings. In class I would squash them with my fingers and roll their bodies into little dry balls until their wings crumbled into dust.

#2:

Older people say your past will catch up with you all at once when you are older and wiser and least expecting it, but honestly I don't feel there's a lot of past to be caught up with, at least from that strange white-and-green coloured period in my life between the ages of thirteen to eighteen. In that twilight zone I am trying very hard to imagine what life once was like. At best perhaps it was a sort of a cotton-threaded cocoon, in where I saw not a lot and moved very little, and sometimes wriggled a bit to show my parents that I was still alive. Nobody faults silkworms for being boring, but they aren't getting their life stories published either.

#3:

In that same year there was an English teacher who would assign writing prompts as punishments: five hundred words, embarrassingly worded, perhaps even a little deranged. On hindsight they were pretty good prompts. "Write about the colour purple." "Today was a muscular day." Of course fifteen-year-olds weren't having any of that, and it became one of her many eccentricities among things like beginning all classes standing on our tables, or making us move bricks across the parade square.

I was never assigned any of those prompts (how could I be badly-behaved?) but I wrote some of them anyway, on the tail end of Facebook and its long-forgotten Notes function so very few people could see and what few that could didn't need to pay attention. I wrote about purple, and I wrote about muscular days. It's nice to imagine these happy little pieces of writing nestled in some corner of Mark Zuckerberg's digital basement, gathering dust like starving Neopets, or wriggling like many tiny unhatched cocoons.

#4:

I was going to do many things. I thought I was going to be a horror writer, or make webcomics, or die before I was eighteen. I filled worksheets under my desk with scribblings in mechanical pencil (0.7 lead, 2B), practicing anime eyes, the backs of heads, my left hand. I had a sketchbook and wanted to buy a tablet. I read Stephen King and took him seriously and I loved it. I loved the walnut-wooded dark coolness of the library space, its aged shelves so picture-frame-perfect they might as well have been plucked from a colonial furniture catalogue. I found a wasp cocoon on one of them once, brown and dusty and full of holes. Years later I wrote a story about those wasp cocoons. I never drew again after secondary school. I folded the worksheets under my desk into paper planes, paper moths, paper darts; flew them in safe well-defined paths into designated recycling bins.

Eventually someone would make them into paper again, or so I thought, and the little graphite markings on them would peel off in the chemical washes, and become little black specks on someone else's worksheets, or congeal, to be picked off by flies, and eaten, and reborn as eggs anew.