Shenanigans of high school and JC days → Running around in our blue and whites, spending long hours together. We laughed and we laughed and we didn’t realize time was stealthily running away from us each time the bell rang, each time we sang the anthem or each time school’s out for the day. Now I look back on those days when we were in our teens and it is a time where I have nothing but fondness and affection for. It was a place where we were clueless about what’s to come, enveloped in what we thought was important to us then — things like who was in love with whom, not knowing those times of simple love, unadulterated by burdens and our pasts, will tear us apart someday.
Technology, now obsolete → I remember chatting till the wee hours online, when we logged onto MSN the minute we were home. It was a space where people became closer by some magical connection (probably the Internet connection.) 3AM was not only the witching hour but it was where hearts were opened, secrets were shared and feelings were made known. I remember a time when our phones were not very smart, but the physical buttons were perfect for feeling our way — braille-like , as we typed below our desks in class. We didn’t realize so much could be said within a hundred over characters a text, a few texts a day. We didn’t realize it would come to a point where we type so much now but say very little; in comparison, we typed so little but meant much, much more then.
People who have come and gone → At different times of our lives we were close to different people. Some have been very, very close to my heart and now we barely speak. It would be so easy to bridge the gap of these 5, 10 years, but we are paralysed by groundless fears. Have we changed? What would we talk about? There were social groups that have now been dissolved by circumstances. There were pals we had silly adventures with and now they have been left behind, together with the dust of memories and time. But we take comfort knowing that there are plenty who stayed in our lives and they don’t seem to be going anywhere else anytime soon. I am quietly ecstatic that these relationships have lasted and strengthened through time. We have weathered the storms of love that destroyed a part of us, we have learnt about new technology together and use it to tell each other we think about them every single day, just by constant conversations. These are the people who have stayed past your teens and outgrew it together, these are the people who will be with you when you outgrow summer flings and puppy love to finally have a family and they’ll be there when your kids outgrow you.
These are things I occasionally miss when I remember the wonderful sunlit times of the past that could do no wrong. My brain accidentally leaks out the blemishes so I wouldn’t recall them if I didn’t want to. These are things I occasionally find myself wistfully mourning over, how time has eroded some things, how growing up also means shedding some old skin. But I am so consoled and content to know time has brought more joys to make up for what we have lost. Soon we’d be thinking about now as the past and it is these constant reminiscing and forward-looking hearts, this melancholic feeling of having known what it is like to have loved and lost, that makes growing up and growing old such a sad yet beautiful passage of time.
