In Continuum.

Same Time Last Year

You know those days before I met you
Well good 'cause I don't either
It's almost like they were meant to
Make the whole thing sweeter

There is something about the air in the canteen that sticks to your shirt, hours after you left it behind. With the new birds cramming into the already crammed up school compound, it was almost suffocating to share the tiny canteen with the juniors as well as the seniors. And I was just thinking to myself how great it felt to step off the platform of the bus and away from the peak hour crowd in the morning. It was merely a leap from the fire into the pot, and the smell sure wasn't helping much with the easing at all. There isn't anything wrong with the food there actually, in fact I think they taste great with the amount we pay. However, I have a thing with body odor, and I prefer to smell like myself, more than anything else.

Sitting in the bustling canteen at 1.30pm today, the smoke from the bowl of noodles I was eating attacked my face. The smell tickled my nostrils and there was yet another round of rumbling in my stomach. Surviving on a single roll of bread all morning was not an encouraging thing at all, and diving deep into the soup and the noodles, I had my hasty lunch before the next lecture started half an hour later. Jeremy was there with me, swallowing up his Japanese food at light speed, and in the midst of all the fleeting images around me, I thought about something almost too frightful for me to face up to.

You think I'm just a boy who's
Consumed by all his fears
The fact that you should have seen me
Same time last year

"This year has been passing really fast", I said after swallowing a mouthful of noodles, blowing air out between my lips because it was too hot. Jeremy agreed, and I thought I saw more than just an agreement in his eyes when I told him my observation. Because really, I'm sure everybody feels it somehow, that the Earth must have rotated around the sun a tad bit faster. How else do you explain the vivid memories that we still have of the events that happened same time last year? The words we said, the way the sun felt upon my skin, the way the sand felt between my toes as I made dives after dives at soaring Frisbees.

I do remember the event from a year ago after consulting my blog's archive. On the 27th of June last year, I was at Sentosa with the company and playing games under the baking hot sun. The entry marked the day of the company cohesion day, and I remember that day well. The lot of us were gathered at Sentosa in our beach wear, feeling the sand between our toes and the sun above. We were like sliced salmon in an oven, and the sound of our shoes scraping over the sand-covered pavement sounded like sizzling fishes on the grill. Or perhaps it might have been our skin burning up under the heat, we were not too sure. However, it was a great day on hindsight, a day when the lot of us really bonded and had a lot of fun - despite the heat and the lack of pretty girls to look at. You start to wonder if it really has been that long since that fateful day at the beach, if somebody fast-forwarded the time and filled in those blog entries in between for you to achieve this illusion. But the disconcerting fact is probably how I remember typing each and every one of those entries, which means that my conspiracy theory has been utterly shattered.

Same time last year
Oh, the same time last year

In our age with fast technological advancement, we no longer see the world the same way as we do. As the microscopes continue to look deeper into our human cells, as the telescopes continue to reach deeper into space, humans then start to wonder the reason for our existence, the significance of ourselves in contrast to the rest of the world and beyond. Such questions have been in existence for the longest time, but I think it is more relevant and more intriguing in our age of discovery. We start to examine our lives a little differently, and every occurrences from a different angle. With file transfers and downloads happening a million times every minute, it is not difficult to equate the tool bar of these transfers to the time span of our lives.

Fascinated and at the same time fearful of death, I looked for solace in the face of the calculator. Assuming that I'd live to the age of eighty, I calculated the number of days I get in this life before moving on to the afterlife. That is if, there is an afterlife at all. After much mathematical calculations, I derived at the answer of 29200 days. That sounded like a whole lot of days, until I wanted to find out more. So I multiplied that number by 24 - giving me the hours - then by 60 - giving me the minutes - then multiplying that answer by another 60 - to give me the seconds. Long story short, if you live till the age of eighty - if you are as optimistic as I am - you are going to be on this earth for merely 2522880000 seconds. And the clock has been in operation for the past twenty-one years for me, and it is counting down one second at a time. How daunting, to have our life flashed out before our eyes on the screen of a calculator.

Living fifteen over
Shortly over the nick of time
I'm sad like a boy, but I smile like a man
Its the best way that I never understand

Sending a picture over to a friend, or a song you just heard on the radio. The way the green task bar fills up the white spaces in the box. You start to see your life in that green task bar, as the percentage slowly adds up to a hundred at the very end. Being at twenty-one, it may seem like a long way to go till the day you die, provided that you do not get yourself involved in some horrible road accident, or get yourself stabbed in the back alley of some random club. However, if we see ourselves in those task bars, twenty-one years old would mean a quarter of our life gone, the quarter that you are never getting back. 25% always looks good on any Bit Torrent task progress, when you are trying to download a TV show or song, because everybody likes the sound of "It's a quarter done!", because it is - a quarter. But what about our lives? What about our time? What about - me?

Things are moving so quickly now, you feel like screaming at people, asking them to slow down. They all seem to be rushing for something, all wanting a certain intangible thing to happen, an invisible absolution. The pedestrians on the streets walking so fast, bumping into one another and seldom looking back at all. Or the way the vendors sold their food in the canteen, serving their customers one after another, making bowls after dishes, dishes after bowls. We all forget a little thing called "Human Interaction", and time slips by like that so fast. We all become victims of ourselves, as we look back at the things we have done same time last year, like the things we have done only same time last night.

I wish I would have made it
I hate the view from here
I didn't think I'd think I'd saw my wife that summer
That same time last year

I cannot help but hum to the tune of John Mayer's Stop This Train at times, especially on the eve of my twenty-first birthday. XinYu messaged me online just the other night to ask if I have any plans for my birthday - if I REALLY don't have anything planned at all. It is too late now to do anything anyway, and it's not like I am the kind of person who likes party in the first place. Especially now, when I am thinking back on my life a year ago, and feeling a sense of loss all of a sudden. It feels like being on the eve of a major exam with nothing prepared and the books untouched. The way you feel so helpless and frantic, and you just want time to slow down for a second, or a minute for you to take a breath. As children, we all took time for granted. A day turned into night and a night turned into day without us caring much about tomorrow. Perhaps this is a sort of retribution, to have our life flying by like that.

So much happened in between then and now, so much has happened. The worst outfield, the wettest outfield, the last outfield, the last book out, the first sense of freedom in two years, the first day of the rest of my life, the first love, the first kiss, the first woman, the first heartbreak, the first true hate, the emptiness that ensued in the days before school, the first orientation - the first in a long time, a new life, Stanley's accident, Stanley's war, Stanley's death...Where were you the same time last year? Lying in a random grassy field with your loved one? Made love to him or her for the very first time? Picking your nose while nobody was watching? Or rotting away before the television? Where were you the same time last year?

There, another second gone.

And there's another.

And another.

And another.

And another.

Death, one second at a time.

And another.

Oh, the same time last year
Oh, the same time last year
Oh, the same time last year