Going Back Ten Years

I’ve just attended my JC class gathering. We’ve known each other for 10 years now. The attendance was surprisingly good… for a class of 18, we had 12 who showed up. Hanson and Yen Li haved ROM-ed… Revathi is now married… Jelaine is getting married end of this year, Daphne may be doing so next year, and Vanda is also getting married soon. Plus… Jean is finally attached (!!!!), and we got to meet the boyfriend tonight. Grins. Man… its amazing to think how everyone has already moved on so much… and even more amazing to find that we can still keep together as a class.

I remember showing up for this gathering with some dread, just wondering what else is there to say to each other after so long. After all, we’ve all been living such separate lives all this while save for a few, and over the past few years we seem to have distanced ourselves quite a bit. I only agreed to turn up cos it marks the 10th year that we’ve all known each other.

I keep my class picture on my table, under the glass. To think that its ten years already!! Funny thing is… looking at the picture… we all really haven’t changed a bit. Not in the least. If we put on our uniforms again, we’d look exactly the same as before.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised at how easily conversation flowed. The banter kept going, and we were pretty much able to catch up with what each other is doing. Perhaps there is a kind of familiarity amongst close friends that make it easy to catch up after so many years of losing touch. I remember we were such a tight bunch back in JC 10 years ago. So much so that even though I was just about the most active in church back then as I ever was, I still considered myself a lot closer to my class than to tuanqi. There was a sense of looking out for each other in the class that never was around in tuanqi. And I guess it was there that I first understood what a close community can do to each individual, and was something that I tried to bring into my own circle of friends wherever I go.

So there we were, sitting around the table, eating more than was good for any of us, and asking each other everything from jobs to partners, to rumours we heard of each other, and laughing at each other as we reminisced abt the past. This was the first gathering we’ve planned in a long time already. Each time we met up previously, it was always for a funeral. For a while it was really scary, as our parents and grandparents seemed to be dropping like flies. (And maybe that’s why we were more at ease this time round. Somehow I never knew whether or not to just keep quite and keep funeral visitations short, so as not to seem as if we’re behaving inappropriately when we start laughing.)

I think friendship can be such a curious thing. The closest friends can grow so distant at a moments’ notice, either through neglect of each other, or after a falling out. Two strangers can become best of friends after a shared experience or encounter. Two people who looked like they could be best of friends might lost touch within a few years, while other friendships which looked so unlikely are still going strong decades later. Nobody really knows how it works, and despite our best of intentions and promises to keep a friend, they draw distant after a while. Some friends we intended to slowly allow to drift away, yet they ended up being here to stay.

I remember back in JC, we used to celebrate Valentines’ Day by calling it “Friendship Day”. Ironic that as I’m using this blog to countdown to V-Day, I shd suddenly be reverting back to celebrating friendship, and what it means to me. Friends are so important to me. I’m definitely not the sort who could just be alone and content. Some time not too long ago I was feeling really lousy, and tried to ask some people out. Turns out nobody had time, and I was thinking to myself how these are the moments when I wish I had someone in my life whom I had a ‘claim’ over, that someone whom I could impose on because I needed someone to talk to. I went home and told myself maybe that’s why I’ll always be alone. Because I had such a person in Grace, but we never really could talk. And whenever I become close friends with someone I can talk to, I don’t dare to risk the friendship by trying to turn it into something else.

But ah well.

At least for tonight, I started it by dreading the meet-up, and ended it by being really glad I showed up. And perhaps that sums up how unpredictable friendships can be. And also how much it needs to be cherished when one possesses it.

I remember we were sitting around, playing and singing this song one night after we left SAJC, and it struck me that the line “And so we talked all night about the rest of our lives. Where we're gonna be when we turn 25”, and how it used to be something we looked at as a future that wouldn’t happen for a long long time… and now its something we look back on, having passed the 25 yr mark some time back.

Sigh.

So tonight… just for old times’ sake… I’m putting this song up.

Grins.

I really think the best years of my life were the 2 years in SAJC.