My brother used to love being out. Nights, weekends, he made friends with the streets, and the streets with him. He could never resist the peer pressure. He'd excuse himself by saying he was still young, and that he'd reform as he grew older.

Eventually, he decided he didn't like leaving me moping around at home alone (since it was just us two students living together), so he declined his friends' future invitations to keep his loser brother company.

He's the only person to date to choose me over others. He knows, so he does it all the more. The only person whose pity and sympathy I gladly, hungrily, accept. It's the one form of love I can always count on.

I've had women. Discreetly, secretly, but unreservedly.

My emotional state back brings back uncomfortable memories.

Seemed like I was looking for ways to give my lost self the attention, or love, or whatever, that I craved deep down. One with no conditions or clauses.

I started to see something. People in the relationship-pool seem either shallow, or materially focused. It made it hard to communicate my past pain, which mattered more to me than deciding where to eat today.

When you grow close to someone, someone who you talk to day and night, you start to expect them to understand you on a deeper level than the rest of the world. To see the signs of your badly healing scars. To know. To acknowledge them, try (not necessarily succeed, just try) to mend them.

I never found what I was looking for. So I've stopped looking, for the meanwhile.

Now my dating app's more just a source of quick comedy relief every so often, as I smirk at the grammar or stories of inane singletons.

Are relationships the answer to our problems? Are we waiting for a beauty to conquer our beast?

I believe they are important for a healthy life. Guess they don't belong in mine, then.

But who knows, maybe when I'm a bit older. Fewer and fewer people seem to be meeting each other in real life these days.

And of course, with relationships, there was the money issue. A woman only needed to know the area I lived in for her motivations to subtly, but to my paranoid eyes, obviously, change.

In such a way were my infantile eyes opened to society.

So far, all the young people I've met have only ever been after one thing in their lives.

Makes me think, if I were poorer, would I also spend my life ogling the decimal points in my next paycheck? Growing old, waiting to grow rich?

It's just one of the things that has convinced me. The world is a shallow, bastardised place.

We come into it without a choice, acquire our 'place' and status without a choice, and we'll leave it without a choice.

I did go through a religious phase. If I'm honest, I haven't completely left it. Perhaps it's not a phase after all.

But that can't be. Everything in life is just a phase, right? You never stay the same. Your priorities keep shifting, changing.

But anyway, I did go to the Mosque quite a bit. For guidance and stuff, I guess. Still go for Friday prayers.

Perhaps I wanted someone to sit me down and tell me God would love me for whatever I was, unconditionally.

It would be the only sort of unconditional love I've ever received (except for my brother's, but he's my brother, that can't count).

I went to the mosque, in my long black duster coat and Scottish-checked scarf wrapped around my neck, and waited for the Imam. Then, as soon as he was free to see me, both of us sat on the floor, legs folded, my hands placed neatly on my knees, I hurriedly asked him:

"Does God love me at all? Does he care that I exist? Does he exist? Or is it just a lie to make our selves feel better? If he does, does he know I'm suffering?

That some days, I cease to see a purpose anymore? That sometimes, I wonder why I'm here at all? I'd rather have been a rock or a tree, you know. Rather than an acutely sensitive, emotionally unstable human being.  Plugged up to crazy pain receptors in my brain, triggered at insignificant things.

I feel like I'm geared to live the unhappiest life possible. Why? Some days, I feel made to suffer. But ending my suffering ensures eternal suffering apparently. Isn't that too much suffering? Where to run from it all?

Maybe I should go enlist in a war or something?" I pant out.

But I'm not done.

"Go to Rwanda to help war-torn families." I don't think before I continue. Because if I had, I wouldn't have said it.

"I might stop on a mine or two, huh? Maybe then she'll give a f***ing shit."

I paused for breath. I'm sure I was pink at this point. God, I hate being pink. I'm pink most of the time, but sometimes I just get pink-er.

The man looked at me calmly. I looked at his hands for the rest of the conversation.

I look at my hands now, ruminatively. I look at the guests around me, engaged in empty-seeming chatter. I sit apart, alone. Everyone expects it. I'm the last person they greet, and the person they forget to say goodbye to.

I have to be here, you see. Mum would skin me and my brother if she heard we didn't sit with guests.

Perhaps I can tolerate some years. We spend longer beneath this earth than on it. It's only a short life after all. I'll be old and dying soon, probably wondering what I spent my youth agonising over.

Just let it pass. Apparently, my patience will be rewarded.

Just let it all pass. Hardship is followed by ease.

There is no perfect life. You'll never be completely happy. The glass will never be full, the cake never whole.

But you have a glass. And you still have some cake.

Now I'm no preacher, but I always liked the idea of a God. A nice guy up there who you can smile and wave hello to, and who might even wave back. I liked the idea of something in my mortal life outliving it, and lasting forever, and that forever being on my side. I'll be honest, I flit to and fro between being a believer and less so, but in that moment I went to the mosque, it was kinda nice. The crux of it is that I like talking about life. About death. About everything.

I can't help thinking, maybe you look down on me now. Divulging my weakness to you has acted against me. I knew it would.

But you know, I have been looked down at all my life. By people I saw everyday. By the one who should have loved me most, whose love should have acted as a balm to soothe my growing pains.

Your stranger's nose makes no difference.

So you've listened to my tale. Well guess what? Us South Asians provide our services first, and charge later. Call it kindness, or call it wit.

I do demand my dues, now.

My payment is this; tell me something.

Once I was dying to know, but now?

I'm just curious.

What is your refuge?