Tuesday, April 20, 2004

A birthday card

Happy Birthday.

7 years ago, I found you quite the unlikely candidate as a Singsoc ex-co member.

Rather, it was interesting that our friendship should occur in the context of us as committee members of an organisation that effectively hindered so many of us from going out there to experience London as a Londoner - what for? The Singaporean crowd was so cushy and comfortable.

So on hindsight, you with your bookish medic student charm and a healthy disdain for Singaporean idiosyncracies somehow doesn't quite gel with my idea of a typical Singsoc committee member... lol... funny thinking about it.

In fact, 7 years on, you are still quite the mystery to me.
It always strikes me as strange how you seem to be able to draw ready friends around you.

You just don't exhibit the ready qualities of 'Mr Popular' - none of the arrogant smile, nor the penetrating eyes, nor the disarming but contrived, learned charm, nor the low-brow humour that marks you as 'one of the lads', nor the debonaire wit that sets you apart as a 'ladies man' do you show - but one is drawn to you... how?

In Ramsay Hall, you were a permanent fixture in that dusty basement computer room in the renovated wing, always typing away at a new story, a new reflection, a new friend on the IRC, remember? On sleepless nights I would head down for a quick email check or a very very last minute essay due the next morning, and there you will be too, sleepless.

Working away at a medical thesis? Didn't realise you wrote essays for your medical degree.

But you were interesting to watch. You carried with you an aura of intensity that I found disconcertingly reminiscent of someone else in my teenage past - as though you were full of questions, burning to ask whosoever it may be that those questions were for -

Not very typical of a Singaporean guy.

I laughed when you wrote about being guilty of not really looking at people in the eye - I found that interesting too!

Yet your questions penetrated me as I sat in your room that winter afternoon to seek refuge - and I found myself unable to confront them. My face WAS a mess of tears, but it I choked also on the questions that were like flaming red probes stoking at my burning shame.

I was happy to hear when you said you were attached - 2? 3 times? in the years after I was done at uni. But I guess life is never quite as neat as we like it to be, even though we do try to write about it, at least to give the past form, the thoughts texture.


In Someone else's words

Opinion. Looking back at my archives, they still touch me. Some even inspire tears. Who better understands those words than the writer themselves? But sometimes, I feel it's as futile as trying to press a flower to preserve that moment. You will still get a semblence of it at the end, but it will never be that same fresh flower that you picked up long ago.

Today, we move in separate circles now, your life and mine.

Yet, I find myself reading your entries as a daily sojourn. There is something about your thoughts and your words that echoes my own experience here -

sometimes they still singe at a deeper part.. the same kind of questions that I should be asking, but never have the courage to.