In Continuum.

New Found Glory

Using the Guardian as a shield,
To cover my thighs against the rain,
I didn't mind about my hair.

Sitting in the back of the class, the palms began to turn moist and the sweat came pouring down my face. It might have been the weather, or the fact that the fans above my head weren't operating at normal speeds. There was a wall before me, an invisible one, filtering every images that got into my eyes. For everything was blurry, and I remembered little about the minutes leading up to the entering of the teacher with her stack of test papers. Everybody was excited, chattering ceaselessly under their breaths, some of them with eyes beaming with confidence while others - like mine - with fear.

It was a random summer three years ago, sitting in the classroom on the fourth floor of my school, some time after the last series of exams before the dreaded A levels. It was the paper that acted as a final gauge of progress, a final chance to redeem and prove yourself before the A levels begun. Like all the other papers, I remember trying my very best to catch up with everybody else, staying back late in school everyday just to pour my attention over the notes and the homeworks. But it was more like an attempt to find Kryptonite, or an attempt to turn a rock into a needle. Because nothing worked then, and every thing that I read went out of my ears. There was a surge of desperation inside, picturing myself with a cork in each ear during the papers. The image didn't help with the studying at all, and I remember entering the classroom during the exam itself and feeling ill-prepared and utterly stupid and hopeless.

Your jacket may be waterproof,
But knowing the moment you get home
You're gonna get your trousers changed.

Back to three years ago, I was still sitting at my desk and trembling all over. My mouth felt dry, the way it would if you breathe through your mouth for too long in an air-conditioned room. I spoke little that afternoon, and around me was an aura of dread and depression that few classmates dared to venture. That was how much I dreaded the results of the paper, the ones she was going to release in the classroom that day. It was Mathematics I remember, and I started thinking back to the days when I used to be good at it, or at least remotely interested. Those days were gone the moment she started walking down the rows of desks, giving back the papers according to the grades so that the best student got the papers first while the worst had them last.

Reading out each grade, her smile soon turned into a expressionless face and then a frown. There was a bit of hope inside, that the last one wouldn't be mine, that I'd be the second last, or the third last, a fool's hope. However, as the stack of papers in her arms slowly decreased in volume and the names were read, she gave up towards the end and stopped saying the grades altogether. As if the class next door could hear the grades and laugh at her for not giving her students the good grades, as if she was ashamed of the results to even say them out loud. Because that is how I felt like when she gave out those papers, all stapled up and stacked on top of one another. It wasn't an encouraging sight when she walked towards me with just a single script in her hands. It was my script, and she was nice enough to have the grades face downwards when given to me. She handed the papers to me, and there was an imaginary wave of heat coming from the bottom of the paper where the grades were, a wave of nausea coming over me and breaking the wall.

Failure is always the best way to learn,
Retracing your steps 'til you know,
Have no fear your wounds will heal.

I took a peek at the grades in front, and that took about one second before I closed the paper again. The bricks of the imaginary wall laid before me, but all I wanted was to have them materialized and rebuilt before my eyes. Because that was what I wanted to do then, to run away from it all and not care a thing about school. The grades were horrendous, probably the worst in the school - that I had full confidence in. Confidence crumbled inside, thoughts swirled and I weighed my options. Thoughts of razor knives running over the surface of my skin appeared, and the sight of myself smiling to the white-tiled walls in the bathroom as the blood dripped appeared too.

My head felt heavy against the back of my arm, which was sandwiched between the forehead and the table. The ball of dust in the corner of the table where the legs were, rolled about with the wind above making little cyclones below. But the coolness wasn't getting to me, and like the dust rolling about underneath my table, I saw myself in the ball of dust. The way a house would look like after everybody has left the house and abandoned it for years. The way it would be covered in a thick layer of dust, choking anybody who decides to enter the house. Like the remnants of the past, the ball of dust lingered around, like me, as I watched the rest of the class take an express train away from where I was, leaving me behind to lick my own wounds and eventually, rot.

I wish I could travel overground
To where all you hear is water sounds,
Lush as the wind upon a tree.

To me, life ended in Secondary School and restarted again in the military. There is a gap in my life for two years, a piece of land that fell through a hole into an infinite abyss. A piece of my life that I chose to forget, almost every detail of my two years there. When asked about my Junior College life by Jonathan from school, I told him that it wasn't the greatest part of my life, nor was it the worst. However, it merely felt like the lectures of our Communications teacher, Ms. Hui's class. The way the students would enter her class and be caught adrift in her flow of random and incoherent thoughts like a leaf in the wind, then spat out into the sea at the end of the class. That is how we generally feel like during her classes, and perhaps the closest analogy I could come up with when it comes to telling people about those two years that I selectively forgot.

So you see, getting good grades never seemed to be my forte. Passing made me feel good about myself back in those days, and getting an A was as good as making it around the world on foot. It was a miracle back in those days, to have anybody get an A in anything. You are practically worshiped if you could attain such results, and people saw you as some divined being of sorts, a godly figure. That was my perception of those top-scoring students in school, the way they always carried around a sort of light around them, emitting from their backs and illuminating the crowds. We all stared and we all looked. We all glared in envy and hope, but none of us ever came close to touching them at all. Because in the heat of their light, we got too close and we all burned out. At least I did, as I died trying.

I wish I could travel overground
To where all you hear is water sounds,
To capture and keep inside of me.

The college life was a new beginning for me, like the sunrise on the last day of outfield in the past. By celebrating the sunrise of the last day of outfield, the boys would fish out the last of the remaining food in the vehicles and have a feast of sorts. We usually try to ration our food and have them evenly spread out over the total duration of the outfield. However, we never really followed that rule very well, always eating more than we should on the first few days. So whatever that we ate on the last day as the celebration really were just leftovers of the previous days, but it's not like any of us minded at all. It was the last day of the worst days, and it was the beginning of a new and better one.

Let's just say that I have been doing very well in terms of my grades. My brain is still on the process of trying to register my new found glory, still trying to take in the fact and truth that I have proved myself worthy of praises and good grades. The part of me that lost hope, the part of me that lost faith, they call came into a giant convention inside my head and felt honored to be - even for a day - me. It feels good to read my grades off the list on the white board and have a smile on my face at the end. It feels good to hand to your ESL teacher your essay and have her smile at the end of it, saying that you need little editing to the piece because it's 'Perfecto'. It feels good to be needed when my friends and I are sitting in a group, studying for a test or a paper. It feels good to be me, the new me, and my new found glory.

Failure is always the best way to learn,
Retracing your steps 'til you know,
Have no fear your wounds will heal.

It felt like the time when my parents and I were in a random shop selling suits in Taiwan. Facing the daunting rows of suits, it was difficult to know where to start looking at all. It was as good as putting somebody oblivious to the varieties of coffee beans in a coffee brewery, and have him pick out a kind that is the most expensive. We were lost in the rows for a while, as we fingered our ways through the suits and touched the surfaces to see if they felt comfortable to our bare hands. I pretended to know what I was looking for, but I was in fact very clueless about my expedition into the shop. It was like venturing through the Amazonian forest with a compass that doesn't work and a map of Singapore. I was lost, but at least I found my way through it all.

Wearing a suit for the first time that day, I felt good about myself - for a moment - in front of the mirror. In the merciless honesty of the mirror, I often felt depressed, felt beaten. The scrutiny of myself through my reflection often told me to give up, to shut my eyes and to leave the room as soon as possible. Not because of the physical attributes, but rather what laid beneath my skin and bones. I didn't like myself at all, hated that I was screwing up every exam in school and letting everybody down. It was a kind of failure that was self imposed, and I didn't have anybody else to blame but myself. That is the worst kind of failure, the kind which you have no rights to point fingers. That was the kind I was faced with, the kind that I triumphed over and broke out of.

Still trying to fit into this new suit, still trying to fit into this new skin. It may be because of the fact that it is the first semester, which is why everything is feeling like a warm breeze. However, I cannot deny that this is a good start, a great start. I cannot say that "Oh, it was pure luck", because it was not. Like the way Jeremy so confidently puts it whenever somebody wishes him luck, he'd eagerly tell the person that he needs more skills rather than luck in a paper. Which is true, and that is exactly what I proved to the world, but mostly myself. It's not the end of the world at the end of the world. Because one end is merely the other's beginning, and my life - my real life- has only just started. Thanks to all the new friends and the old ones who came so far with me, guiding me, loving me, embracing me. Thank you, really, and so much more.

Failure is always the best way to learn,
Retracing your steps 'til you know,
Have no fear your wounds will heal.