The dim terrace reeked of year-old moulds. I took my last Dunhill out. Shoot, I thought, should have picked a new pack when I walked the guest out. 

It appeared my guest was, just then I learned, a notorious celebrity of some sort. I checked online. I could recall seeing the man in talkshows and whatnots. Quite an imposing character he had on TV, if you asked me. But the one I met with this afternoon was a calm figure, one that was deliberate with his moves. Shaky, even, at times. Didn’t really know how he’d found me, but I wasn’t too keen to learn. Tonight was our second encounter, and while he shared some chunks of his daily struggle as a single, ‘minted businessman’, in his words, I couldn’t say I know why he sought for my aid in the first place.

Yet I could never want to judge. My sole business was to comfort. 

You know, this kind of discord didn’t really come as a surprise to me. I understand that my clients are complex, both in their heads and in their surrounding worlds. Boys, gals, moguls, students, married, never married, divorced. All sorts of people with their own motives. As far as I know, every single one of them was worlds apart from me, and probably from each other; the only thing they shared was baggages they brought with them. And with those baggages, came a need for solace. 

I decided since long, that although perhaps people are tightly wired to perform, it’s always the tiny moments that define them. Yes, they put on some masks, or a role to play, from the moment they took off their shoes behind my dull apartment door; but boy, did their truths leak all over, perforating their sweet talks.

My phone buzzed slowly across the picnic table. I didn’t check who.

Mind you, I don’t exactly love being crudely, and so shortly, loved for my role. This was simply my way of getting by. Yet, I must say, I took my own pleasure from it. Not from the actions, as I’ve muted my senses too long I stopped trying to reclaim it; it was from the brief stories. The peeping hole I was granted by my trade to see into the peculiar lives of the crowd. It was there, you see. The firm handshake that a lanky but dignified young graduate equipped. The soft weep of a sturdy elite bodyguard he himself was unaware of. The relentless sweetness of a stern, lonely businesswoman. The moment of baring that, thankfully only a handful realized, exposed also their senses of the world.

I took pleasure from them. I've known for some time now that my business dulled me, if only slowly. I couldn’t bother to break free from my circumstances, but I lived through by taking pieces of the baggages.

The intricate lights of the city murmured from above.

I kept coming back to this part of a poem I read somewhere.

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough; 

To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? 

I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. 

Whatever that piece was talking about (I was then drawn only because of the somewhat soothing lines), I now see it as something written for me. Look behind the outlines, and you’ll see too—that people emit stories, long or brief, and the woven tales are the sea I’ve been living on. Those threads were never mine, but the ones I saw, I dearly hold onto. I made them made me.

Another buzz. I lit a half-burned cigarette from the ashtray, God knows how long it’s been around, and puffed. Then, a knock on the door. I figured it was about time.