Today my grandmother popped by for a surprise visit. We exchanged few words and merely smiled at each other a lot. This is due to my limited Hokkien vocabularly, save for a string of vulgarities and other stuttering verbs that I obviously could not use on her.

The two of us watched b as he watered the plants. Her, exuding a gentle demeanour well seasoned with the age of time and wrinkles. Me, barefoot, a novel cradled in my hands. Him, feet dressed in daddy's slippers, spraying water droplets with a certain vengeance and creating rain in that little world of ours. And when she smiled, I found myself smiling too.

Afternoons like this, could almost take my mind away from prepping for the upcoming tests and never ending term papers. Afternoons like this, when nothing titanic and headline-worthy happens, would fade away to nothingless in a corner of my mind that I would forget the directions to. Afternoons spent sleeping away half the day, sipping tea and listening to weepy Chinese songs, snapping pictures of meaningless things, digging out vintagey finds from dusty drawers, raiding the fridge and other silly dreams, flipping through outdated magazines that should have been recycled paper by now, painting pictures, reading nothing and kicking my legs in the air. Letting the grains of sand, precious time that we should utilise wisely, sift through the spaces between my fingers. Afternoons like this, when I should really be off writing my essays and not blogging.

All of these, countless and forgettable afternoons, that would form the invisible bulk of my life when I take a train back home on my deathbed.