When You Think About Me

She empties the last drawer and, between stray baubles, there's the cookie tin, the one hunted down from some narrow shop in Liverpool because it didn't ship here.

- Wen-yi Lee

She wasn't supposed to have kept it. But she's moving out at last, keys in her pocket and her newly-wed husband outside, and here's the tin Sam carried across the world for her.

Her mother comes in nagging about packing the breakables. Her mother has buzzed for months about the big move. Poking into the reno, offloading crockery, telling her kitchen tips and laundry tips and how often to clean the toilet. Her parents are so excited. Their little girl, married and making her own home, just in time for the new year.

She says yes, ma, understand, double wrap.

Sam lives one road down; everything about them was serendipitous. They were best friends the moment their ankles got tied together in the Secondary 1 orientation camp, inseparable, conspiratorial, sleepovers every month and at all each other's holiday gatherings. Sam's dad always gave POSB hongbao. There was always wine for Christmas at Sam's, which felt so grown-up.

She shakes out the cookie tin. Unsurprisingly, nothing but dust.