3resilience

Dropped a bit off the radar because, inexplicably, my home has been cut off from the internet. The technicians will be around on Sunday to have a look at the connection, but until then, my family are internet exiles. Now my evenings at home are strangely empty, since there is no access to email, Facebook, blogs or any of the other fixtures of a night on the net. It's funny to feel the gap so acutely. I don't actually think this is a sign of internet addiction; I don't miss the connection per se, I don't miss being online. What I do miss is the connection with my people, or if not the connection per se then at least the possibility of the opportunity for connection.

The closest analogy I can draw for this sensation is when I went to Penang, and effectively fell off the map for a few days, with no one to communicate with but myself. There is that feeling of dislocation, of disconnection, if I can put it that way. Back then, it was a liberating feeling. But here at home, where connection and communication are so tightly woven with the very acts of being conscious and awake, the intrusion of this feeling is disconcerting and disorienting. It's like that feeling of waking up on the floor and not remembering that you rolled off your bed at night; for a moment you are vertiginously free of the anchors that you expected to be around to locate you in the real world.

So here I am, with the clock ticking close to 7pm, taking advantage of the school's internet connection to write here. The lateness is not really due to my writing here; was clearing a batch of comprehension marking before this, and that ate up a sizable chunk of time. And before that, was having lunch with Joel and Ms. Ong, and as our meetings are wont to do nowadays, there was about fifteen minutes of eating and nearly two hours of lingering. And on Tuesday night, went out with the usual gang to the French Stall at Little India (the one that I had always been intrigued by when passing it along the road on a homeward bus - by going there, I lost a certain shade of interest that had been coloured by unfamiliarity, to gain a new tinge coloured by delight) and had surprisingly excellent French food (giant profiteroles, anyone?) on wicker chairs under spinning fans, with one of Singapore's torrential rainstorms swooshing by outside.

And earlier than that, met up with Joel from the old Platoon 11, and went to the Rail Mall, where we found this delightful Italian deli. We sank into the conversation as easily as our teeth sank into the caprese, ravioli and gnocci (my first encounter with the latter was a really delectable experience of bouncy dough pieces ennobled by a truly rich and complex sauce of four cheeses). We may both be out of the army already, and our perspectives have certainly changed, but we can still look back so easily and slip back into that mode of thinking and conversing. And it strikes me again, how lucky I was to meet such good people in my unit, that I can come out of that experience with stories that I am willing to tell voluntarily, and that I can look back on with a real feeling of warmth and nostalgia.

And I think I will look back on these encounters, and the thing that I will find the most remarkable is the carefree way in which we talked, and the absurd and incredible topics and trajectories across which we would bodily hurl our conversations. The quality of the talk, that precise and rare carefree approach, the utter lack of self-consciousness or any need to second-guess, the certainty that you could say anything because nothing can be taken in the wrong spirit, and after all, the friendship we had would make even the most provocative statements seem like just so much amusing froth afterwards; this is the most apparent manifestation of the nature of our relationships. I hope I will encounter them more in the future, but I cannot shake the feeling that this state of affairs is unique to us, or at least that part of the wonder of this state of affairs is that it is not replicated elsewhere, and perhaps cannot be replicated elsewhere.

And soon, Kats will be taking his leave, as the clock winds inexorably forward and our disparate futures catch up with us. I still wonder what our friendships will transmute into under the pressure of time and distance and disconnected experiences. My experience so far indicates, hopefully, that there can exist an unchanging core that will survive anything this world can reasonably throw at it; but one can't be sure until you're in the thick of the change, and beyond any hope of retracing your steps to an earlier, more amiable stage. You work with the fact that you have no choice but to move forward, and hope that whatever is produced by it is worthy of whatever existed before it.