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2002-04-12 - 2:49 a.m. Saw a kid on a bus once. He had a fishing rod and he was seated at the back. He was wearing a singlet and slippers, a small boy, and he was eating keropok from one of those plastic packages that has no 'tear-here' slit so you'd have to attack it open with your own teeth. So he was munching away, and I saw that he hadn't caught any fish (or maybe he had but let them go?), and then slowly, in the surreal fluorescent-lit interior of the slow-crawling bus, he fell asleep. He must have been exhausted, his keropok packet was in his hands, I was so afraid he'd drop it. His mouth was slightly open, it was a deep sleep, and his face slightly pained. I suddenly felt this terrible tenderness towards him, wanted to carefully extract the keropok packet from his hands, fold up the opened top and place it by his side, to wake him once he's reached his stop, guarding his side and watching out at the parts of the tinted windows not plastered by ads, I wanted, if I could, to hook a fish at the end of his line, with rainbow-coloured scales, so he would wake up from one dream and stumble in astonishment into another.
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