And Then

...and so, now that departure is within sight, I am going through my last week here at home, with the acute awareness that I am probably visiting all these places, doing all these things, seeing all these people, for the last time in a year. It still strikes me as incredible, this impending and total shift in environment, the most fundamental shift in the assumptions that make everyday life possible since enlistment. It is something unimaginable, unthinkable: and so, in the empty black void into which the experience of the next year will go, I now fill with fanciful ideas from what I read and what I see, vicariously. And I have grown used to these fantasy images of what college life is like, of what life in New York is like, and to contemplate that the fantasies will transmute into reality soon is still something incredible to me. The inertia of familiarity and habit tugs strongly at me.

But anyway - for all those who are concerned, I am returning to Chinese High tomorrow from ten onwards, one last time in my old school before going to my new school. I am also returning to URA later that afternoon to complete some administrative tasks, and perhaps to pop in at the Physical Planning office for a while. And though my flight is scheduled to depart on Saturday only at 6.30pm, my intention is to go through the glass gates at Terminal 1 by 4.30pm, partly because I want to get this whole process of relocation started as soon as possible, but also because I want to take this rare chance to explore T3 before I go.

Add to this the daily excursions for meals with old friends, scattered packing, and preparatory reading for next week (yep, we aren't even official students yet and the school's already given us homework), and you have a general impression of how these final days will play out. Of course, everything is still steeped in the acute awareness brought on by a feeling of finality - and yet, it seems rather underwhelming for the final pre-departure week, if you list it out like that. Maybe it would be more poetic, more artistically fitting, if I were to spend every day wandering the streets of this well-loved city, torn between my wanderlust and a nascent homesickness, enthralled and heartbroken equally by the prospect of departure.

But then again, this is an idealised version of events, borne out of the ame sources that gave me those fanciful ideas of New York and Columbia. That would b a goodbye fit for a biographic film, a regular tear-jerker. That option is not open to me; rather, I have the long goodbye, a leave-taking from this place that is characterised by slow walks and open eyes, a feeling of amazement and amusement at the incidental things that this city throws at me. Does it make sense that this way of leaving means more to me, precisely because it doesn't mean anything to the place I am leaving? Singapore will continue to exist after I am gone; and somehow I find myself taking a surprising amount of solace from that.

I guess it's also the same idea with old friendships and connections: the biggest solace is not from a showy and cathartic farewell, but from the assurance that the old friendships and connections will still persist even when we are all gone. Then, there is no loss in departing. Then, departing loses its preeminent fearsomeness. A good goodbye, then, is not so much about saying a proper goodbye, but more about laying the foundations for the next reunion. Rather than being a resolution to what has happened up to that point, a goodbye is thus a resolution to meet again in the future: an act of faith, and an expression of confidence in the relationship that has led up to this, and what is to come.

This, then, I think, is the meaning behind the last send-off of this season for me, as we went down to the airport to send Y's junior G on her way to the Olympics (the lucky git!). Standing in the expansive, cool space in Terminal 3, looking at the plasma screens with their magic-word names that are really incantations to transport you in a flight of fantasy, and seeing a flight to New York - not mine - and the flight that some of my other friends will be on to go to Paris, I suddenly had this image of what Saturday would be like. Not an end, but the beginnings of a beginning. Not the capstone that is the finishing touch on an era of friendships that is fading away, but the foundations for the continuation of that era.

*

...and this departure seems to me to also be a mind-boggling trip through time. Two years ago, when my people started to depart for their studies, strewn across continents and oceans, I had had the feeling of having been left behind, stuck on a dead end, on a path through NS that was tangential to where I wanted to go. Since then, that path had become better integrated into the greater scheme of things, or at least I would like to think so. But now, finally on the eve of my own departure, I realise that some people have changed over the last two years, having faced experiences that I cannot even begin to imagine in an environment that defies my conceptualisation. And so, to some extent, this departure is now an attempt to finally catch up with these people, to make up for time that has been spent elsewhere.

And reading the introductions of my fellow CUE (that's the community-service programme that is letting me go to New York a week earlier) participants, I also have an eerie sense of having to step back in time as well. These people are young, mostly younger than me (whereas in 6SIR I was among the youngest in the unit). It is folly to fault them for being younger, and yet I cannot help but notice the difference in perspectives and attitudes. The proliferation of exclamation marks and onomatopaeia in their self-introductions; the urgency and even impatience that I read in their short paragraphs and sentences; the rambling content that speaks of the beguiling spontaneity of their lives, the exploding richness of every event that baffles someone who tries to record it sequentially. The breathlessness of being on the very cusp of life, on the very forefront of their endeavours. The youthful self-satisfaction at the impression of having accomplished all this by one's own strength. The faith in a sense of entitlement that is impressive in its intensity, and yet disturbing in its narrowness.

It does worry me that I feel that I have outgrown all this. It seems like a sign that I will have trouble getting fully involved in all the happenings in undergraduate life, that I will far too easily dismiss perfectly understandable indulgences as frivolous and childish. And it is clear that this is a problem with my own perspective, rather than with their approach to life. Thankfully, though, since the problem lies in myself, it makes it more likely that I can solve this myself. Nevertheless, I have no real idea of how to even begin to correct this defect in my perspective. And time is running out.