Studying in my room is a hazard, not least because my computer keeps restarting on me. When it’s not rebooting every 15 minutes, it’s short-circuiting itself and driving me to insanity.
When I’m not pulling out my hair over my desktop, I’m being distracted by the photographs on the wall. There’s me at 14, wide grin at the back, Ryan Chan(“yeah, this is the beatbox!” at my side with a host of other familiar people. Fresh faces flushed with youthful innocence and prim photograph pretensions, and I find myself staring at them way too much, wondering if any of them know what’s ahead of them for the next four years.
The other two photographs find the same faces here and again. Kuan Wei with his baby face and half-cheeky, half innocent grin, John with a bemused smile that hints at a maturity beyond his years, with enduring weariness to accompany it. Dianzhuang with a dizzily infectious loping laugh, Jun with a glowing smile that was far too rare for that year, Hongshan with a blank face affecting the film noir cool of Humphrey Bogart. And there’s me again at 16, face scrunched in some curious cross of wild abandon and gleeful joy. i don’t see that too often nowadays.
Some nights I find myself sleepless and remembering the silly laughs and things we used to do, cheap thrills for a laugh. I remember Friday afternoons congregating at Kuan Wei’s house, taking turns at the PS2 playing Winning Eleven, laughing at some poor soul hopelessly failing at some computer game in his room. (More often than not, that poor soul was me, but that’s not the point. Or maybe it is.) I remember the rush of adrenaline and testosterone that would accompany some after-school game at the street soccer court. I remember spikes of blind anger that went with childish arguments and fistfights that somehow always made friendships closer. I remember nervous anxiety during rare quiet moments where I’d wonder if I’d make it past the exams and reach where i wanted to go.
Well I’m here now, where I wanted to end up, but more often than not I find myself longing for simpler times, when faith was an easy possibility, friendship was sweet enough to take for granted and laughter was free and abundant. it seems like an eternity ago and in some ways it is: an eternity and two souls ago.
I’m too old to be a naive child and too young to be having a midlife crisis. So what am I? A restless teenager bored of studying for his exams and encountering the odd bout of existential nostalgic angst, that’s what.
Maybe it’s the flu, maybe its the late-night coffee, or maybe it’s the recognition that I’ll never return to the time when my best friend was a phone call rather than a lifetime away. But I miss my boyhood.
These silly little wounds will never mend I feel so far from where i've been
There’s something calming about sitting down at the piano, holding down chords and letting them linger, foot on the reverb pedal. When this kind of stupid depression takes me, I find refuge in losing myself, listening to the sounds of delicate warmth bounce off the walls and in between my ears, reverberating through air and time. I can lose myself there, which is rare nowadays.
Nyeh. Late nights studying for exams and this is the kind of pointless rambling that you get from me. I really should be studying again, promised Kitty i’d be in bed by 4.
The summer is all in bloom the summer is ending soon
