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.