Reuniting My Thoughts 2

Time would have been kinder to some more than others. Some of us would have put on massive amounts of weight, while a lot of us were unchanged. Some of us were married, and some of us still revelled in the freedom of singleness.

Some of us were hardened by work, and had lost our adolescent enthusiasm for life, as evidenced by the tired looks in our eyes, and our inability to afford even a polite smile.

Some of us would have moved on from school, and some of us, would have remained:

He comes over to our table, mustering up enough courage to say hi to us; we were friends, but not all that close.

He says hi to one of us on the table, and the rest of us look away politely. His conversations carry a tone of compensatory overfamiliarity and awkardness about it.

The friend he is speaking to on our table asks the cursory questions.

So how's life?
How's work?
How's your wife lah?

The last question triggers something inside of him. You could see it in his body, as he recoils a little defensively and postures himself for an attack.

His choice of weapon is interesting - shocking truth.

"You know ah," he says, "I am the record setter in our batch."

"I am the first among us to get married, and the first one to have a baby."

"And now, I am the first one to get divorced."

There is a moment of silence on our table that seems to last an eternity. The preceding awkwardness is now magnified ten times.

The friend he is talking to is quick to apologise. "Hey, I'm sorry lah, man. I really didn't know."

"Okay what," he tries to say dismissively, but his nervous gulp suggests he was still coming to terms with it.

"Eh, I'm really sorry. How long ago lah?" my friend asks gently.

"Two weeks now. As I said, I am the one to set the record in our batch, what." His lips thin into a line, as he attempts a confident smile, instead tinged with sadness.

-----------

Later, another friend returns.

"So I was out having a cigarette with him, lah, you know, and he was complaining about how he felt really left out here."

"I mean, he kept comparing himself to us, and how he was never really as smart as us, because we were all in the science stream, and he was from the arts stream."

"All of us are like professionals, while he's stuck selling handphones. And I was like, 'No what, I was from the science stream and see, now I'm unemployed, what! Aiyah, I told him, we are all human lah... Different people with their own lives and their own sets of problems.' But you could see that it still bothered him."

I looked across at their table, and I could see that he was trying to compensate for his perceived failures and lack of self-esteem.

He was the loudest among all of us, he tried to outdrink all of us. He would lead the yam sengs and made the most noise, trying to silence the emptiness he felt inside, trying to drown out the little boy who was told by the school that he was not smart enough and would never amount to much.

The little boy, who believed them.

Who wanted nothing more than to drink his way into happiness and to remember as little of tonight as possible.

I am saddened that sometimes we continue reading from the script that we were given in school, and keep playing it out in life.