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?