I am a creature of the night, shaped by habit over the years. 1.30a.m and I’m at the laptop eating Maggi mee and drinking Milo, comfort food from home. Instant noodles always work their magic for those few piping hot freshly-made soup minutes when you slurp noodles down contently letting the spicy hotness trailblaze down your throat into your tummy. Than the noodles start getting soggy and the soup gets cold and then you get reminded again how much monosodium glutamate you’ve just consumed. I’m going to have less hair on my head at this rate of practically a packet every alternate day. What to do, I’ve discovered very recently that you only need an electric jug of boiling water, a bowl, a pair of chopsticks and a spoon to create magic. A pot is unnecessary which means everything can be done in the comfort of my room. No need to step out into the sometimes dirty and messy common kitchen.

Silence prevails, punctuated by static and chronic coughs. There’s that quiet mix of sound that puts your mind to thinking many random things. I’ve been wondering, what is twenty supposed to feel like? I feel so old on certain days in certain moods, too old to be just twenty this year. Sometimes there’s a draggy, weary feeling as though I’m an old, hunched, wrinkled lady carrying an immense weight and stolidly trudging along one step at a time on a wooden cane. And on other days and moods, I feel like a child skipping along in a pink frock and pigtails with matching ribbons with a blue balloon in hand running and laughing carefreely as though I’m ten years old, and not twenty. Two decades. Twenty, the big 2-0.

I tell myself that I’m a mere slip of a girl poised on the threshold of adulthood with teenagedom behind her. Not too old that I cannot skip along gaily with pigtails yet not too young that I am unable to shoulder my share of things. Thank God that I have you and I don’t have to skip along alone or shoulder it alone.

Part of me wants you to go on sleeping so that you can catch up on all the missed weekday sleep. Another part of me wants you to wake up just for a bit so that I can tell you at this very moment how much I miss you.

Its 2a.m and I should already have jumped under the blankets and clean sheets and let myself drowse off to sleep.

That’s just what I’m gonna do right now.