Into the Now
Four years later and I get the feeling again I am on the precipice of something. I know that very soon my life will be cleaved again into the 'before' and 'after' - and what a sensation it is to recognise this before the fact, and that it effectively divorces me from the present, not knowing how much my memories of the 'now' might persist, and what value it may hold.
This revelation has been a quiet shock to the person whose teenage self, in all her naïveté and sensitivity, had felt many a tortured moment over the discovery that memories - an intrinsic part of her identity-building then - may not have the weight or constancy she demanded of most other aspects of her life.
At heart I know I am still a sentimental person, but this world a sentimental person cannot bear.
No matter how hardened or cynical I think I have become, privately I know that the reality I am stepping foot into is a jigsaw puzzle for which the individual pieces I have dreamed up feverishly in my head, all the nights I had laid in my tiny bed, in my tiny room, in this tiny HDB flat on this tiny island. My private exercise of castle-building and an extravagant ruse of magical thinking proved true; images of myself in a large apartment (preferably with etchings on the wall not unlike those you see in posh Parisian apartments), a white heater by an open window from which a cold wintry breeze blows in, myself walking through familiar streets through the passing seasons, to my important job where I conduct important business.
I have not yet figured how sentiment and the feeling of luckiness sit together. But I cannot shake off the feeling, as I step into the 'now' - that I am so terribly, terribly lucky.
(Lately, I have been thinking still, the ruthless persistence in some images and the sentiment which accompany these memories: the early frenzied, cool, dark mornings of a new school year; extremely late nights mindlessly surfing the web and discovering so much about myself and what I liked, away from the mainstream; my teenaged self tottering about with friends after school, with the first licks of freedom; lazy days at the college void deck, chattering on about everything and nothing which then seemed relentlessly important; somehow, that very dangerously hazy afternoon in Summer that Chloe and I spent exploring (a very nascent) Jalan Besar - we used to make entire events of days; my first taste of puppy love, awakening over a night of cards and my first date where we spent so long talking the mall had closed on us; days at the bakery set to Passion Pit and Of Monsters and Men, the wafts of butter and vanilla extract over me; myself spinning about the Left Bank under a clear dusk sky feeling so incredibly lucky... actually, I still hope I never, ever forget.)