In Continuum.

It is a tradition of the Chinese to do spring cleaning when a new year on the lunar calendar arrives. It is a belief that by doing so, bad luck and fortune would be swept out of the house as a way to welcome the new year. Similarly, perhaps this should have been done a long time ago, when I actually had so many opportunities and reasons to do so. My cellphone contacts are pretty overcrowded, an observation I made after running through from A to Z. There are some people whom I hardly remember there, and numbers belonging to people whom I don't even know. I don't know why I have Adrian's ex-girlfriend's phone number there, nor do I know why I have Carol's phone number there either. They were probably just numbers I picked up along the road, and became too lazy to delete them as a result. It is that mentality inside of me, the voice in the back of my head that goes "Who knows? You might need them". But really, I really don't need them now, not anymore. 

It's funny how a few buttons on your cellphone guarantees the complete erasure of somebody from your life. Certainly, those people mattered to you enough in the past for you to take down their numbers, they must have meant something to you one way or another. But here's another evidence of the witch doctor's (if you remember who he is) prophecy coming true, and it sucks to have him being right all the time. I found myself trying to remember who was who in my contact list, and I realized that most people there were people that passed me by, people that were important to me for a single purpose and then left as an entry in my contact list in the form of eight digits. To see those people being reduced to just eight numbers in my life is a little sad to witness, but then I guess neither of us made much efforts to create a deeper impression. 

Sara told me how deleting contacts on her MSN list is therapeutic, and I guess in a way I can say the same about erasing phone numbers from my cellphone. It was a very quick process, and it didn't require too much brainpower to do so. Select the name, press "Cancel", select "Yes". It became quite a routine when I got to the names starting with C, and I almost thought I developed some kind of talent by the time I reached "M". As easy as sounds to press those buttons, those people were gone - just like that. And it makes you wonder how scary technology is sometimes, when we depend so much on it that we lose the function to remember phone numbers with our brain. There are numbers I still remember, especially those numbers which I used to call almost on a daily basis before I acquired a cellphone. Krishna's home phone number, Alvin's home phone number, Samuel's home phone number, Cliburn's home phone number, and it's amazing these numbers have turned into crystalized memories in my head. They cannot be erased, there aren't a set of buttons to press for you to forget the shape of their numbers. But everything is digitalize now, isn't it? We take the capacity of our memory cards for granted, and deleting an old friend from your life has become so disturbingly easy.

The idea of such a complete erasure never caught on, never appealed to me. It's the idea of it being so definite, so irreversible that scares me the most. There was always that nagging feeling in my head, telling me that I might this person's number for emergencies, or I might need that person's number in the future. The truth is, I haven't even called most of them before, and I don't suppose I'd be moved to call any of them, anytime soon. They simply mean too little, and it pains me to say something like that. As much as I would like to think that every individual that came and went in my life have been important and special, I don't suppose they think half as highly of me as I hope to of them. They have probably deleted my phone number a long time ago, so it would be rather silly for me to place so much hope and faith on the possibility that perhaps I made some sort of impact on somebody else's life whom I barely even know. It's like a break-up, you always hope that your partner is in an equally sad, equally depressed, equally broken state as yourself. When in truth, he probably can't be happier that you are gone, like a wisp of wind. 

I do not believe in such a blind faith in people who do not have the same kind of faith in me. I do not think that it would be smart to leave those people hanging around my contact list when I know that they cannot wait a second more to erase me off of their lives. A contact list should consist of people who matters to you right now, or people who thinks that you matter to them dearly. It is the easiest way from me to them and from them to me, like the shortest distance between two fixated points - a straight line. All I have to do is to dial their numbers to show that I care, that I give a shit about what is happening in their lives. Similarly, all they have to do is to dial my number and find out what is going on in mine. It is that reciprocal care and concern that I appreciate the most, and how short a distance we have between one another no matter how far away we have come on our own separate ways. The numbers on our contact lists are the shortest distances to the friends that matter, and I have vowed never to give in to my own ignorance of their presence any longer. 

Do you need me, I am here
Can you ask, can you be clear
Yes you need me, I appear
Now you are me, I am here

I deleted a little over a hundred names if I counted corrected, names that I hardly remember anymore. There are actually people whom I have zero recollection of their faces, not to mention those numbers I got only to threaten my friends with. Brought back memories of the time when I threatened Krishna that I'd call his crush from school, and it ended up with him chasing me around the school and wrestling me to the ground. I guess, more than just the people those numbers belong to, I am also deleting these little pockets of memories that I have of the past. Not a complete erasure of course, but I guess it is just less likely that I'd be reminded of that incident, with that phone number of his crush permanently erased. Faces that I don't remember, somehow I wished that the phone numbers would be like binary codes, piecing together an image of those faces that I have forgotten over the years. But they don't work like that, life doesn't work like that. What has to go, got to go. And those hundred names and numbers were gone in under five minutes. It's scary to think about it but, that's the way it is now.

It reminded me of that other time, when I made up my mind to delete the folder in my old computer. The folder had a whole bunch of pictures the ex and I took together, the pictures that we took while we were out on our numerous dates. Quite a big folder with a whole bunch of pictures, and I figured one night that there wasn't a point leaving those pictures hidden somewhere in my computer. So I took a deep breath, prepared myself for it, and pressed delete. It didn't take long for the pictures to be completely erased, and surprisingly there wasn't a moment of regret, or guilt, or any feelings that may have came along with such a definite act. I think there is still a folder in the backup drive with all the pictures in them, but then it's not like I am using the old computer ever again. It is probably going to get older and older, rust from the inside out, and the information inside are eventually going to be inaccessible even to the smartest hackers out there. With time, everything just fades away. Memories in your head, and physical memories in hard drives - just everything. Like your phone number which I deleted last after much struggling, life didn't feel any different the moment your name disappeared from the screen either. I am still living, still breathing, and the only difference is the smile on my face after it happened. Sara was right, and I did the right thing. I really did.

If you trace my phone number on a keypad, you'd notice that the shape looks somewhat like a fish. It's true, it looks somewhat like a fish folded from a piece of paper, like in origami. Cliburn's home phone number forms a straight line in the middle of the keypad, and the tone of his number, when heard from the receiver, sounds like "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", I am not kidding here. There are some shapes that I will never forget, some tones that I will always remember. Even if I have deleted your number, I don't suppose it is going to be erased from my mind anytime soon. I have dialed that number countless of times, in the day and in the night, for happy reasons and for reasons that are better left unsaid at this point in time. 

I dialed, I never searched for your name in the contacts. Because I enjoyed dialing, seeing the shape form underneath my thumb, the shape of you. To tell you the truth, and I am not exaggerating, while my phone number forms a paper fish, your phone number looks like a black heart on my keypad - because of the black keypad that I have. I don't think I am ever going to forget the black heart, even if the numbers are forgotten. There are only so many permutations you get get with eight digits starting with the number nine that will give you the shape of a heart, and I guess this black heart is a heart that I never should have won, for I would have eventually lost and broken my own at the very same time.