Oddities in Silence

Of all the queer habits that I could've picked up amongst the silence the one I did not expect was to make friends with a grey bunny plushie. Pity plushies don't talk; at least they're nice to cuddle.

The world as was, the world as is, the world as will be

"We're past that stage", a friend reminisces; she was angry at two friends' seemingly distant reunion - they didn't hug and just went back to business. "it was just this mind-blowing moment when I heard that", she commented. I remember that phase myself - where me and Jon decided against taking a photo with the Jar. Our friendship is deeper than that, we thought.

October 12 2014 he replies a message I sent him on the 21st of August. Been busy, he says.

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A year later another message appears out of the blue. J's back in Singapore for three weeks. What do we talk about? Sweden? China? My plans for the future? His plans? The other J?

So much to catch up on, so much to talk about. At least I know that with some friends the fences are really moats instead of walls. Even if they're ocean-wide at least the paper aeroplanes come once in a blue moon.

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Sometimes you don't realize but "We're past that stage" isn't a good enough reason to keep a memory of things. You ARE past that stage. We all are. But we don't stay there forever. We only recognize the stages that we've gone past but never the ones that are coming up, never realize that there is never a stage that doesn't need to be recorded for memory. Every stage feels eternal and everlasting until it's gone - the flights, the farewells, the breakups. We all move on, eventually. 

It's fine if you don't want to remember the past and want to burn the pictures away. It's not fine if the pictures were never there because you foolishly thought that friendship was forever, that times never change and that people never change.

They do. They all do. We all do. The mother you see everyday making breakfast could be in the operating room tomorrow, screaming enough in the nights that you wonder if euthanasia via painkiller overdose would ever happen. The friends you see everyday for hours on end last year aren't even in the same continent as you anymore - Asia has no future for them. Even in Singapore, the people you see together, the people you support, may very well be apart the very next day. They have no future for each other. People move. People change. People move on. 

When you realize that the times you spend together make up 90% of all the time you'll ever spend on Earth, that 90% of it is already gone, squandered into the good memories with nothing lasting to show, you think a bit more about the 10%. The remaining tenth that you have to earn - in flight tickets, in reschedules, in trying to get everyone together for what could be the final magical moment together. You start to see it for the magic it really is; the ones that come free along with the ones you earn. 

It's just a pity you never know what the real percentage of remaining time left with each and every person you treasure is, huh. If you treat every meeting with your friends as the very last meeting you'll ever have with them (fearing the car accidents, plane crashes, and every other statistical outlier that could possibly fuck you over) you'd always treasure each and every second you spend with them. But you can't.  

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We really should've taken that picture with Jar. Between Europe/America, Asia and Australia, who knows when the three of us will be together again? Three years and counting. Will it hit a decade?

Thoughts about thoughts, writings about writings

It is not so much with much reluctance that I restart writing this blog, as it is with much inertia that I find it extremely difficult to restart this blog. I no longer have a way with words the way the mes of the past have had; I have probably traded a life of thought and mind for being more easy-going, glib with my mouth and more understanding of people.

I really wish I could easily write in the way I did last time, I do. But at some point life became about living as opposed to thinking and mindlessness became the way instead of questioning, Thinking became an issue of 'what is wrong' - thinking about how to correct a problem so that you can stop thinking. Maybe the problem is that you're thinking. Maybe that's the true sign that something's up.

It's not even that I am incapable of any coherent thought altogether - I've had decent, quality conversations with a number of friends talking about a large number of things under the sky. People, events, ideas, the like. The saying was that which category you talked about more determined your intelligence; maybe I just went from being intelligent to being dumb, average and smart at the same time. I could live with that. But my tongue flows when people are around. The good and bad, the smart and dumb, the deep and shallow.

But here it becomes a wall. Thousands of words are fine for university essays but five hundred a struggle when reflecting on my own life. Maybe it's the lack of people. If I have no one to interact with, the thoughts cease. Could that be the case? Could I just be a foil to everyone else's life, doomed to giving nuggets of wisdom and thought but never thinking hard enough about my own life? The thought is attractive - the conclusion depressing. But it is a thought. I've lost the ability to talk to myself. About myself. With myself.

The writing habits are still there. The rule of three. The nice, short and succinct sentences that give the little staccato in the writing. The longer run-on sentences that feel almost like rambling a series of afterthoughts after the initial point. but never truly follows coherently. The streams of consciousness that ebb and flow, the thoughts that slowly arise to the surface but recede back into the sea before I get a grasp on it. But the thoughts behind them are empty. All that is left are thoughts of thoughts. Writing about writing.

A thing about quiet people is that others always try to assign other traits to the quiet person - is his or her silence golden? Is there wisdom behind the facade or hollowness? Everyone knows that the man always talking is hollow - empty vassals make the most noise. No one ever mentioned that the quiet ones could go either way.

And for now, the silent vassal here is hollow. The attempt to knock at it to create some sound just echos and reverberates mindlessly. Just more sounds of knocking from attempting to knock, echoes of thoughts from trying to think, traces of writing from trying to write.

It's still too difficult for now, but I have to get back to this somehow. I have to try. I just hope I keep trying. The thoughts are there. They're still there for now. I have to catch them before they're gone and I stop thinking. Before the time where the only thinking I do is how to go back to being thoughtless.