and years, like shadows,
fall away...

the pile lies on the floor, a collection of xmas, birthday and goodwill cards, a stash of letters, the yellowed lines and scripts detailing how we write our lives by hand before the age of the internet, one tracing the years all the way back to 1992.

i wanted to clear my drawers during the holidays. unknown to me, i had collapsed these years into one drawer, having sorted the letters and cards i wanted to keep a long time ago. this time i was disposing more of them again. empty postcards collected from serial continental trips abroad, unused, unsent. a near-fetish for travel & place- a useless tribute to places where you merely visited but never quite lived in.

a stock of letters from my platoon mates signalled out for attention. i now could backtrack and revisit the past. the winding nonsensical notes we wrote to another, complaining about post-bmt unit life and wondering in a very raw way, where our lives would go, or (are) going. there are a several lines that tug the conscience. and i sometimes wonder why we haven't found the time to keep our lines open, clear and stable. perhaps we were too young, too impetuous to hurry by, confident that our common experiences in bmt would eventually pull us through, for many seasons to come. we were wrong. so awfully wrong. everyone was eager to change, some quite rapidly, convinced that ns was merely an utter waste of time, a temporary stop for other roads ahead in exploring and revising other values, beliefs and outlook to small and big futures as yet unseen and unheard. we thought we could answer these frightful questions by doing; imagining and chasing gals, streetwear, clubs, other communities. and into religion and university. one thought he was heading home to family, while others wanted a complete break from God, whatever that word meant, then. several embraced new faiths, two landed instant careers and a handful eventually drove or flew away to some fashionable distant place. what we really longed for was stability, a pinch of luck, and some vague notion for an ambition we had not even begun to craft for ourselves.

among the lot are 2 whom i want to be in touch again. to anil and weiyong, if you happen to chance upon this blog by some rare twist of grace or fate, let me know. i hope we meet again. you were / are my best buddies in the army. it's been almost 15 years since we last booked out of nee soon camp together, sharing a cab to cck before feasting on simple home-cooked fare at humble Hans. we didn't even know much of ourselves then. but the familiar tug and raunchy jokes helped us to sail thru' some of the toughest and most amazing times we felt in green...mass pt, soc, night range...mess tins and night snacks...area cleaning.

there are somethings, some persons in life you can't put away, no matter how hard you try.