Cloudflow

Walked onto the terraces yesterday morning to find this in the sky: a delta of cloud, a sky estuary. What invisible crosswinds and currents must have kissed it to make it wind and weave like this...

Anyway, on the way home yesterday, ran into Ronnie from the OCS days on the train. It was an unexpected encounter, and I was definitely caught off-guard. Half of my brain was trying to retrieve the name; irritatingly, I could only remember that his name started with an R. The other half was scrambling to call up the usual long-time-no-see routine to buy time.

It was one of those encounters that gradually slip out of control, spiralling into awkwardness. What started off as a jovial greeting became, after subsequent missteps, a disengaging maneouvre, with me counting down the stops left till Simei. And what really struck me was how it all happened so accidentally. One thing said in innocence was taken in the wrong spirit, and then a defensive feint was interpreted as aloofness, and pretty soon, you feel yourself shrinking away from the contact just as the other person's shoulders get drawn in just perceptibly, the other person's face tighten just slightly. And then you know that you're making the wrong impression, but you also understand that saying as much will only make you sound condescending and petty. And so here are two people bound up in social conventions, locked in a collision course, and looking out for the first chance to duck out of it.

Well - I daresay I am overdramatising it a bit. Certainly Ronnie is not that kind of petty character who will pass judgment on the basis of a single encounter. But I remember how we parted ways a year and a half ago, and how this new meeting will compare to the circumstances back then, and I cringe, afraid that I did not manage to do justice to what had come to pass before. How can I explain it, this desire - or instinct - to live up to your past? And how a gesture perceived with a slightly different shade of meaning can place everything in a new perspective, which calls into question the assumptions that our memories of the past are built on.

Maybe this will make a good story, this idea of a chance reunion going awry despite the best intentions of the parties involved, their actions thrown into the wrong light, refracted through all the experiences that they had separately gone through in the intervening time. Also, they get pulled divergently by their distinct futures. I guess this is what happens when we meet someone again, someone who has not been around to adapt to the changes in ourselves that have been gradually wrought over the years, and with whom we know we have no future commitments to. So without a common starting point and a common goal, all we have to work with are the social conventions that parse the present into ad hoc meaning, which, of course, will not be able to compare with what we remember.

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And on another level, I do feel like I need to write something. Something substantial, beyond the comments on students' work, beyond the bi-diurnal ramblings on this journal. Something that will capture this feeling, this feeling in this week, in this month, when I just barely manage to live on the cusp of tomorrow, and still am called forward by the approach of August. This feeling will pass - there was never any doubt of that - but there is also an impression that it will, somehow, never happen again, and because of that, there is also a feeling that, somehow, this is something deserving of proper recording. Do you get what I'm saying?