During lunch with an ex-schoolmate, we talked about other peers who have inexplicably died in just their 20s. One of them was a guy from my class, and my deepest memory of him was his tatty canvas pencil case. It was scribbled all over with graffiti, and one day I asked him why he was using such an abused pencil case. He smiled and said his girlfriend scribbled words and sketches all over it when she was once bored.

All these years later, all I could remember was his sentimentality.