Far Far Away in the South China Sea

its almost time to go.

11 more days to POP (passing out parade). 5 more days to A level results. where will we go from here?

its almost as if life likes playing tricks on us, isnt it? just when you start thinking that life is stable, the inevitable curveball comes and messes things up again. and you wonder why. sometimes you get so so tired, but then everyone does. its just like a route march, with the full pack on your back and your shoulders burning. a burden to be carried, this life of ours.

in the full pack are the items you need for survival in the field. so in a way it is also your blessing, your saviour of sorts. such is the irony of life, that it is both a burden and a gift as well. and we carry it on our backs, just like we carry the weight of the world on our shoulders and the ... weight of our memories.

BMT is almost over. just like that. as usual, time slips past us like the thief in the night, like the cotton seed in the breeze, like the shadows in the night.

as i sat in the fast craft, jetting slowly away from the pier; the artificial beaches rushing past. the waves rolling past. the sun slowly setting over us all, i couldnt help but feel what everyone else in BMT is surely feeling. nobody really talks about it (cos were guys) but there is this sense of loss. that things and life will never be the same again.

and how could it be, that we were once young, brash, foolish boys who came in. and we are still young foolish and brash but it is also tinged by some more compassion, a little more streetsmarts and a touch of sadness...

of times that are once again going to be lost.

one of my best mates in my platoon expressed his sadness at everyone splitting up and going their different ways. to which i told him the inevitable "that's life" and "i may never see you again" scenerios.

and in the end, as i sat in that boat, far far away in the south china sea, with the tv stuttering, the people muttering and others falling fast asleep...

i watched the sun set. and remembered that it also had to rise the next day.

back to school

i had a strange dream yesterday night. i was rowing a dragonboat and in it were my family members. only my cousin and me were rowing and the rest were sitting around but the dragonboat still flew over the water as if it were as light as a feather. it felt the same, rowing harder on one side meant the boat would turn to the other side and the cox responded likewise as well.

at the end of the dream, the thing i felt was this haunting pain. something like a cross between nostalgia and regret. it seems that i keep feeling this way about jc, as if there was something that i had left incomplete behind but really , as i think about it more, the answer would lie in the fact that it passed by too fast. much too fast for anyone to realise what was happening until it was all over. and then we sit there and we reminesce about the bulletproof years, the years which flew past us like bullets, the years where we were the ones shooting the bullets and not getting shot at.

we're going back to school today. going back has always been an event of mixed feelings for me. homecomings. returnings. all these have significance, dont they? it assumes that you are wiser and more mature than last time, that you have actually learnt something on your way back here. i hope i did.

and so we don our school uniforms again (at least, only jianwei and me did) like some wannabe role player for some lost dynasty and we triapse back through the school gates. we're there again and that's all that matters, not whether we're wiser or not or how much we've earned.

maybe you could see a rainbow heralding our arrival but we all know that these occurences are embellishments of our head. there is no rainbow but in our mind's eye. red and yellow and green and blue, purple and orange and ... its gone, just like our jc days were, droplets of water that shone with the sun but had to go some day, some time. and it was our time so long long ago.

12 years of being in school. theyre gone now. can you remember primary one and your first day in school? i can't. and i wonder if slowly, as i grow older, i'd forget other days as well. and those i'd forget i'd come up with more embellishments, just like the rainbow; in the vague hope that they would still be real. that they would still be a part of me.

i realise that the pain i felt in the dreams was the pain of loss. of knowing that time will steal them from me, like it steals them from you as well. the fallibility of the human race is that it never really remembers. but something inside me tells me that it is also our triumph. we move forwards, supposedly into the future but our past is never really forgotten is it? it either comes back to haunt us or it goes full circle, like that cyclical theory you learn in history lesson.

you look ahead and you see that your path in life is littered with so many more memories. some too insignificant to be remembered. some too significant to be forgotten. some you want to remember and you do. some you want to forget and you can't.

if someone gave you an option to forget everything about your life, would you take it? and start a new life. a new beginning. the thought is scary and why so? i think maybe it is because we are afraid of killing ourselves. if we dont remember anything, we kill ourselves, slowly.

and so, as i lay in bed, killing myself slowly with regret on my shoulder and nostalgia my bedfellow, i breathed a sigh of longing, a touch of silence and rolled over and went to sleep. as i lost consciousness, i remembered not to forget to remember but the memory of this was forgotten almost immediately soon after.

and i wonder how i remembered it if i was supposed to forget it. life is full of surprises after all.

tekong nights

the nights in tekong are part surreal, part reality. back in the mainland, people laugh and scoff when you talk about spirits and ghosts but nobody really laughs when you talk about em here.

tekong used to be an old malay village until the SAF took over the place. its strange. in the day, its blazing hot. the air shimmers with the heat and people hack when the dirt gets into their nostrils, kicked up by the route marches through the seas of sand and the dead, overgrown jungle vegetation.

at night, tekong is another place. last light falls at 1900 hours and after that everything quickly becomes pitch black. cold winds blow across the landscape, fuelled by the open sea right next to the island. the temperature drops to something in between comfortable and chilly. heated and chilled, chilled and heated.

and when the clock hits 2230 hours, everyone goes to bed and its lights out. and then tekong becomes dead. as in, the home of the dead.

every company has their own stories and their own ghosts so to speak. here's a few from Pegasus company, which is mine. apparently, my company line is quite heavily haunted, which makes for some exciting moments in which your heart pounds and you squeeze your eyes shut and absolutely refuse to open them. its funny, isnt it? im 19 years old and im still afraid.

my platoon is platoon 2. we live on the 3rd story, the first story being the company offices the second belonging to platoon 1, the 4th platoon 3 and the fifth and highest level belongs to platoon 4. every level has its own ghost. how convenient.

the office of Pegasus HQ is eerie at night. its too quiet. at least, thats what my sergeant says when he slept there. his friend was doing COS duty at night and fell asleep infront of the telly which was turned down to a very low volume. suddenly, it goes to full blast and hes fucked out of his sleep. he looks around, thinking he accidentally hit the remote but he cant even find the damn remote.

platoon 1. apparently this level is the best level cos it has the least incidences but that statistic was put to rest when a recruit saw an orange face with black eyes floating above his bed one night. oooops.
and yes, its my batch. not some donkey story from 50000 years ago.

platoon 2. my level. our toilet is supposed to be haunted, which is why i fucking never go to the toilet at night. i make sure i pee my bladder inside out before i sleep. my bunkmate who is roman catholic has his religion and crucifix to protect him so he triapses off to the toilet alone at 3 am in the morning, which incidentally is the so called "witching hour" here in tekong. most of the shit happens at around 2 plus to 3 plus am.

in any case, there are two stories. (from earlier batches) one is that there was this recruit who went to toilet to pee at night. halfway when he was peeing, he heard someone doing hente-taki hen-ta (marching on the spot) on the staircase outside the toilet. fucked out of his wits, he quickly peed and fucked off and when he got outside, the hente taki stopped and a gust of cold wind blew past him. (incidentally, there are lots of gusts of cold wind in tekong and many also find their way into your bunk when your door is closed and your windows tilted downwards. they dunt so much blow at you but land on you and freeze you. thats the que for you to start squeezing your eyes and praying very fast.)

the other story is a bit funny. theres a guy who wanted to go to shit and so he woke his buddy up to go with him.(common practise which is actually regulation but ppl fuck care and just go themselves or their buddies just heck care them)

his buddy was ncie so he agreed and the guy went into the cubicle to shit and the buddy waited outside. the buddy waited for damn long an he went in and asked "eh., why u taking so long?"
"ya ya finishing already just hold on"

the buddy goes outside and continues waiting. he waits for so long that he falls asleep and when he wakes p his other buddy still hasnt ciome out yet. suspecting something was wrong (and damn right it is) he goes in and asks his buddy.
"ya ya coming out soon already la"

the buddy is by now damn ..... what the hell la kind of feeling so he bends down and looks below the toilet door. and he sees no legs.

"oh, so now you know."

the buddy faints.

other than that, section 3 (im in section 1 which is besides another staircase) used to have this guy who was levitated above his bed and the next day he couldnt talk. OOC after that (out of course)

if you want contemporary stories ive got a few too. they mostly come from section 3, which must be the section which attracts the most attention. apparently, there was one night where a guy heard a woman screaming.

and then my other friend wakes up and sees this greenish figure outside the window.(another incident)

theres also a high tech ghost at work cos my other friend receiveed an sms from a guy called Alvin. he has no friends called alvin. and when he got to his handphone the message had already opened up by itself. (instead of the "one message received" thingy that u usually get) and so alvin had sent a normal goodnight message, except the last four words are "Why Are You Here?"

so my friend thinks hes seeing things and he scrolls up to re read the message. and it deletes itself.

and then....alvin sends another message, but its not the same guy. cos the number registered is different. this time, its "????"

i guess the ghosts are impatient as well huh.

other than that, my section is quite ok comparatively, except that my friend who is muslim got his head and pillow scratched by someone on the first 3 nights but he says its ok now. we also get locks being rattled and "cold gusts of wind" coming in soemtimes. i also heard a recruit running down the stairs at night in boots at 3 am. you might think that it could be someone from Raven company right? (cos we share the building with another company) but during that night, Raven comopany was about 12 klicks away in field camp. incidentally, that night was the night where everyone couldnt sleep and everyone fell in late the next morning. as in, the whole platoon kinda thing.

also, you hear dogs barking viciously at something below, then they whimper, then they become silent. all this at 3 am or so.

platoon 3 has some shit that i forgot and platoon 4 has a house that is carved into the wall. apparently, a little boy lives inside the house and he comes out to play with his ball at night sometimes. although recently hes been quite quiet cos nobody has reported seeing or hearing him. and yes, the house is there.

but ive only heard things. i dunt see anything. i have the gift of non-sight and thus i am very happy. if i saw something, i would croak out of panic and then i would jump on my friend to wake him up.

the basic rule is that well, i guess they need their space at night so just listen and go back to sleep which is all you can do really cos if u dunt get fucked by ghosts you get fucked by commanders the next day. commanders are worse, generally.

tekong nights are beautiful but they are also fearful. i confess that when i first came i was lying in bed trembling when all this nonsense was going around. nowadays, im a little more desensitized. if anything happens, i just go back to sleep. for some reason, everyone wakes up at 3 or 4 am. no matter what time they sleep. ask any recruit what time they wake up at night (if they do wake up) and its always invariably 3 something. maybe they want to be heard. exhibitionists!

the dreams here are very very surreal as well. i have never had such a vvid and varied dream life as when i am in tekong. just last night, i dreamt that i had found my way into a woman's toilet. ok it sounds perverse, until i tell you about the decor. it could have won a bloody interior designing prize. its made of glass walls that have running water down it so as to blur out the details. marble plants decorate the washbasin which is carved from ivory and the area where you piss or shit in is formed from water that takes the form of a shell. and after you shit or whatever it closes gracefullly and transports the offensive waste matter away.

my bunkmate agrees as well. the dreams are very surreal. life here is surreal as well but thats in the day and thats another story. for now, whenever we book in on sunday, we know that we have good nights until wednesday night and thursday night, when they all come out to play before friday night is spent blissfully in bed again and the only ghost is the toyo playing with marbles above your head as you sleep.