1.

At the market you run into the boy who was Bishan. Green eyes bright as ever, he asks you how you've been. Before you know it, you've spilled about your the family, the move, the neighbour's new dogs, over the trays filled with wet oysters, tilapia, and fairy squid. He listens to you with sympathy, one hand drawing close the little basket he is holding by his waist, and you realise you've not offered a word -- the old place always had a way of drawing things out of a person. You offer your questions, the same as to any other boy who's been a town.

"Oh, it's quite alright. I don't quite miss it. Got these two hands to do the shopping, got these two feet above the earth. I can hold all these chickens, now!" And you hear a noise from inside the basket that sounds like a little chirp.

"Yes, sure you can hold!" You feel the briefest brush of warm skin on yours as he places a peahen into your waiting hands. It's pale yellow, with eyes like little beetles, and well-loved judging by the way it nuzzles against you. You try to ask how long he's been a real boy, look up at him and he's half listening, bright eyes half-distracted by a cornucopia of brinjals. You gingerly try to pass the peahen back.

He just smiles. "You used to take the 162 back from supper. I'm glad I remember -- how I remember every one of you." Not quite looking at you but looking past you, like he's really more at home among the market colours. You want to ask him more. But of course, he's moved on, they all have. Very differently they've been since they've unseated themselves from the old constituency lines and extended their soft limbs towards us, pulled themselves out of the bedrock, and applied themselves so ardently towards the art of being alive. With much grace, they are still so used to giving things and not asking for them back. You listen to his graceful laughter, still stuck holding the peahen, waiting for him to say yes, sorry! and in your heart of earth-bound hearts you realise despondently that there is still so much to learn.

2.

The boy who was Clementi still speaks like he's got all that traffic backed up in him, those great turgid trails of arterial road that rise and fall with his bare shoulders as you walk through what's left of the nation's forests. "Yeah, had to leave all that behind. Too many undergrads and army boys. Out here, it's a lot harder to get recognised. Am sure you understand." He pushes through the shubbery, trusts you step where he steps, as you'd done times before on so many drunk walks home. He doesn't ever care for your mawkishness, takes you onwards and upwards until you've cleared the treeline and now overlook the glittering black water of the nameless quarry lake.

He sighs like a slamming window. "Just look at that view!" Having seen better, you know not to tell him. It's impressive enough to walk through the world and no longer be contained by it, and not to be responsible for the thronging masses inside you any more. To have one's first time discovering again, and above all to discover the concept of a hike. So many have figured themselves out inside him that you cannot bear to ruin that joy because it's about time he's had a bit of a break. You listen to him shout at all the little ripples in the water for of course he knows each and every one of the fishes' scientific names.

"As a land, I'd always dreamed of being something more sure of itself. Like a boar, or a horse." You somehow manage to tell the boy it's a shame we don't get to choose our forms, whether we get born with lightness or with great gravitude that sucks in the hearts of everyone we know, everyone we'll ever love. It's a curse for those of us that do -- to be forced to leave these big footprints forever. To your surprise, he listens. Wiggles his size-twelve feet and laughs. "No, no, this is great! I think people can have really firm wants, too. It's what I enjoy the most -- that all along inside all of us were these hearts holding so many things, so that now it feels so unimportant to be a place, when we could have been anything else at all. When I think about the whole thing, my love outweighs the rest of it by this much!" He spreads his two great arms, like he's mimicking the cliff face.

You admire the candour, how keenly he's seen to the heart of our troubles. Easier to have learned of it than to be born in it, surely. By and large you're satisfied. It's been a wonderful afternoon, and you haven't thought once about the future at all.

3.

Simei's uneasy, thinks he doesn't have it as good as the others. Always someone else a little skinnier, a little brighter, who goes to the gym regularly or takes photos of spent sushi bowls at the new place that opened up by the remains of downtown. Not his fault he's settled all the way out here! Deciding he'd start making something of himself but afraid of being bogged down by the logistics of the past, he'd settled for you, you near-stranger, temporary passenger. You ignore all of that and tell him he looks lovely in the halflight of the beach moon.

"That's the thing -- I don't even remember if I had a coast, in the first place." Stuck in the there-but-not-quite, not ever exotic, he fears he's never going quite get what it means to be a boy, though he's been trying his darndest at coding and jogging and making experimental little animated films out of sand and moulded clay. "So it's not the problem that I don't know what the advice is, or that I'm not taking it, but you people always make it look so easy! While forgetting that some of us are still so very new to this whole business. Shit, I'm talking way too much about myself, aren't I?"

You try to tell him about the idea of seasonal depression, about how you once hunted for the lone Shopee dropoff point in his suburban depths because you were too scared of people to show your face at the nearby mall. But you sense he has just enough pride left, that he still takes offense at the comparison to lessers. Settle instead for how the old concrete paths crisscrossed through his grassy verges and unbuilt plots of overgrown hills, strange plinths and markings, how you came to know them through the intimate rumble of bike wheels. No matter he's a no-name town -- lent a certain Roman gravitas to it, almost.

Of course, it's not very convincing and he can tell when you're not really into him. Not nearly half as mortifying as when it's with a normal boy, though. "Sometimes I don't understand why the rest of you people keep wanting so much out of us," he admits. You both look down at the dry sand strewn with tyre marks where, certainly as day, they'll try to start reclaiming the coast to make new towns again, not quite learning their lesson as to how they keep turning into boy. Not everyone is cut out to be town, you think glumly to yourself. Some of us are better having been boys all along.