On Saturday, was at East Coast Park when the national flag flew past in a formation of helicopters. An assortment of aircraft made flybys of the beach after they delighted crowds downtown, ostensibly on the way back to their airbase, but surely also so that more people can enjoy the spectacle. All this was part of the last rehearsal for the National Day Parade before the actual thing this coming weekend; all this was yet more evidence that, yes, we are in August now, and departure lies only twelve days away. Twelve days - that's the length of a good holiday!
Anyway, I had been at East Coast to attend a gathering organised by the Columbia alumni for the departing students of this batch. After the tea session for admitted students last year, I haven't had contact with other Columbia students, besides C, who was my junior and is now a rising sophomore. All the preparations, the medial checkups, applying for the visa, reading up on courses, that I've done up to this point had been done amidst a telling lack of real reference points; without real people to corroborate this process, it seemed at times that I was preparing for a fantasy, something unreal. And on Saturday, when I was approaching the designated meeting point at East Coast Park, walking towards the small crowd gathered around a barbeque pit, I suddenly had this strong urge to keep on walking past them, an urge fuelled by an all-too-strong attachment to my carefully cultivated fantasy, and a corresponding fear that the reality will not be able to match up.
As it turned out, meeting these people has not disappointed. There are generally two groups of people: the undergrad students, and the graduates. The graduates, being older, tended to be more serious and stoic about the whole thing. Having gone through a period of work after attaining their degrees, they tended to view their course at Columbia as a step in the process of professional development; and their enthusiasm for it struck me as being somewhat tempered by the centrality of these practical concerns. At times, there were also colder moments, as if the graduates were being condescending to the undergrads - or, perhaps, being resentful that we were still undergraduates while they had already passed that stage of their lives.
On the other hand, we have the undergrads, all extremely excited to be matriculating, repeatedly marvelling at the increasing proximity of our respective dates of departure. Where the graduates could draw on past experiences of undergraduate life as conversation fodder, we drew on the anticipated experience of undergraduate life. And as such, mundanities like housing arrangements, medical tests and advanced placement acquired the cloying attraction of being unknown and unexperienced. At any rate, my fellow undergrads struck me as totally easygoing people, definitely purpose-driven, but also open to having as much fun as possible along the way. I had expected it to be hard to talk to them, especially the junior girls, and especially after these years in the totally different environment of the Army. But it turns out that our common anticipation overrides such distances in experience. Hope is a great unifier.
It was a great relief, then, after all these years of waiting and anticipating, to finally meet the first of the people with which I will be passing these next few years with, probably only tangentially, but perhaps also with a great deal of involvement and interest. And it gives me a large measure of hope at this point, for I figure that if the Singaporean matriculating students are like this, then perhaps something even more amazing awaits me across the oceans. And at any rate, even if the reality in New York falls short of my ever-increasing expectations, at least I know these are the people I can fall back on. Yes, above all else, at least the meeting on Saturday has given me a sense of security, in that what I have been preparing for is really happening, and whatever may happen in the comig years, there will still be some familiar and reliable faces.
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And tonight, met up with Y, who just returned from Paris. After the rather unsettling happenings with other returnees earlier this summer, it was with a significant amount of trepidation that I approached this reunion - and, subsequently, it is with great relief and surprise that I come away from it. For it turns out that all this time and distance has not diminished that feeling of familiarity and trust, and somehow, I have the feeling that the old familiarity and trust is not only as solid as ever, but also stronger for all that it has gone through.
I realise that I do owe particularly much to Y, out of a debt of gratitude for having been a steadfast source of support throughout these long years that have just passed. We have gone through a lot together, or at least, we have remained aware and concerned about what the other has gone through. And yet, perhaps "debt" is an inappropriate term, for this old friendship, like others of this kind, is not built on a transactional basis. What we share in the past, in memory, forms the foundation of the friendship, and when we are concerned for each other, we are not repaying a debt owed to the other, but instead trusting the other to be able to bear even more of our troubles for us. How to describe this set of circumstances? It is like matching debt for debt, and we can do this, we can require more and more of each other, across the barriers of space and time, because we trust the other never to run out of patience, and never to demand the compensation that is owed.
And so it was that, over soba and, later, the daunting prospect of a dozen doughnuts from J.Co, we talked easily of the last year, our travels and our travails, and what the next year has in store for us. The conversation carried on comfortably, as is the case when two people have been away for a long time and have many things to tell each other, but the awareness of the solidity of the relationship that was making the conversation possible tempered the intensity of it, because there was no rush to get everything out all at once. Over the course of the evening, I recognised more and more of this old friend, from old mannerisms to old memories. It was a very detailed sort of familiarity, a familiarity that has emerged all too rarely this summer among my people who have returned, and I daresay not as clearly as it just did.
Unfortunately, the whims of circumstance have worked out so that we only have twelve days to spend in the same place. Last year, a continent lay between us; and on the 16th, my time will be demanded elsewhere, and we will be separated by an ocean. Do I wish this time period were longer? Of course - in the best case scenario, we would both end up in New York. But, things being as they are, do I regret leaving sooner than I absolutely have to? No, not really - I feel there is nothing to regret, because I trust completely that our friendship will withstand the next separation as well as it has resisted the previous ones.
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