Mai vs. Iron

From far away, it looks like a dark tear running outside of his right eye. But, if you know Mai like I do, you'd know that he cries maybe once every two years (usually during a romantic comedy where he spends the movie holding a guy's hand). 

I've always thought that Mai got the scar when we were in high school, but turns out, "I was like three or four," he tells me. "I was playing with a toy...I don't know," he replies when I ask him what kind of toy it was. "I think it was a toy car or something."

In the Philippines, a lot of people tend of sleep in wooden beds that function as multiple surfaces during the day time. On this particular instance, someone (Mai can't recall who) was ironing while a mini-Mai was playing with his probable-toy-car nearby.

At some point, "I had lean over the iron and got the edge right into my face," he laughs, clearly not traumatized by this memory in the least. For that matter, he doesn't remember much else about the incident, like if anyone else was in the room of if he even bled afterwards, let alone how long the wound took to heal. 

He reminds me of that phase he had when we were circa high-school age when he had a weird fascination with burning himself from irons and cigarette butts...clearly, this incident was just the beginning of Mai's pyromaniac tendencies.