In Continuum.

In class, he seldom teaches anything from the textbook, and he tends to wander off with his ridiculous topics, some of them unsuitable for the underaged. But it was an all-boys school, and there was no such thing as an age limit in a setting like that. Which reminded me of the time when the topic of the class drifted from the topic in the textbook, to the life in army, to his platoon mate's rotten penis, to the prostitutes in Singapore - for some reason, he had a lot of knowledge on that subject, to the magical number of 101 which I shall not elaborate. The point is, this strange witch doctor in school had a reputation of speaking his heart, and he'd almost always give us his views on life and death, and pretty much everything in between. One of his philosophies, which I remember as clear as day till this day, was this views on friendship in school, which he thought little of. He mentioned once in class that we should focus more on our studies than those mindless social networking that happens in between friends. He compared making friends to this bus journey home from school, and life is like this standard route that you take as you go from one point to another. Once in a while, people get onto your bus and you meet them for a short period of time. You guys might talk, or some of them might just stay in the corner of the bus and mind their own businesses. But ultimately, everybody has to get off, and everything will change. Sit long enough, and everybody is going to get off the bus you are on no matter what.

I disagreed with that when I first heard it, thinking of it as just another one of his warped ideas that he so enthusiastically shared with the class in the past. But as you go through life yourself, you find that even his warped ideas have some truths in them, like many ideas out there no matter how outrageous they may be. I refused to believe that these people we meet in our lives are just little distractions from what we really should be focused on, that they are just random passengers who are going to get off at their stops sooner or later even if you decide to sabotage the bus and have it stop in the middle of a highway. Then again, this came from a loner who never had a teacher-friend in school, he was the kind of guy who avoided even class pictures and those group picture of the staff in school. He was an oddball, and everybody knew that. But ever since the beginning of the semester, his warped philosophy has crept back into my head all over again.

It's the new semester, changes around the school campus have been both evident and subtle. One of the most evident changes must have been the renovation work done to the canteen while the bunch of us were away for a whole month. Now we have nice wooden ceilings and little glass pyramids hanging above our heads as lights.  Now the stalls have nice illuminated signs to tell everybody what kind of food they sell, though the variety itself is still pretty much stagnant ever since I got into the school last May. The Japanese food store has been removed after the infamous incident with the cockroach in the food, but I think it was really because of the fact that the shopkeeper had nails that looked like tree barks. They were untrimmed and yellow, and to think that those nails were inches from dipping into that soup of yours is definitely not a comforting thought. Either way, that stall is gone now, replaced by another stall which taste just as good, or just as bad depending on your original opinions about the stall, as before. Still, the nasty smell in the air remains, and the queues in the canteen are still so ridiculously long during the lunchtime. Something else has changed though, something subtle. Something that is closer to heart, at least to mine, more than anything else.

It's just hard to have our lives meet, when our timetables are completely different this time around. We all knew about this, we all knew that our separate ways would be inevitable. This is the depressing part about this new semester, this new year. It's the long goodbye to those times spent in the lounge when neither of us had anything constructive to do, but to just sit around and talk about the world as it went by outside the windows. The lounge was our place of retreat, our little place of happiness because that is where our relationship blossomed with everybody else's. It was where hands were held and lines were tied, a place where people got to know people, and a place where those people got to know even more people. But our timetable doesn't allow that now, we are just living our lives because our timetables are dictating how we should live it, what time we should live it. We are on our separate roads now, and we cannot see the next time our paths are going to cross. It disappoints and saddens me to know, that the friends that I have made in the past semesters are eventually going to end up as my corridor friends sooner or later, like the witch doctor said. And to be honest, I hate to know that he was right about it.

There is this girl in school that I smile to, simply because she was nice enough to smile at me when we first met. I talked to her after a lecture in the first semester because she was carrying an Audrey Hepburn bag, and I caught her name in that single conversation we had in school, and her name's Krystal, with the K - I think. Once I saw her at Kinokuniya with her boyfriend, and I remember trying to turn away when she smiled at me, and I said "Hello, Krystal!". She was surprised that I actually remembered her name, and that was probably the last time I talked to her - that was in the first semester as well. Ever since then, we smile at each other on the corridors in school, always greeting each other with our smiles even though we hardly know anything about one another. It is a weird friendship, and sometimes I wonder how it is possible for a kind of bond to exist with just smiles between strangers. She must be feeling the same way with me, the way we wave to each other on the corridors but never sitting next to each for a long enough time to carry any conversation. She looks like a cool girl, her boyfriend approached me and asked me a strange question once. But I guess, as a friend, she remains as close as a corridor friend to me. What I fear now, though, is how a lot of my friends may turn into such friends in the near future.

I remember meeting Jeannie for the second time of the week on Wednesday afternoon as I was about to go to the next class on the corridor, the first time being in the canteen when she came just as we were about to go off for our own class on Monday. That first meeting of the semester was brief at best, and the second one was as good as a brush of the shoulders on the street. The second meeting was when I was rushing from one class to another, and she just so happened to be on the other side of the corridor with a bunch of her friends. We didn't talk much - in fact, not at all. I poked her in her shoulders and I was off running like a marathon athlete. As I was running though, I thought to myself this one thing that remained with me for the rest of the week. I just realized that that was probably the last time I was going to see her in school for the rest of the week, though it was only Wednesday. I haven't got school on Thursdays and she doesn't have school on Fridays, which makes meeting up in school very difficult. The lounge is out, because nobody has time for that place any longer. It's all about food in between classes, and home after classes now. No more recreation, no more hanging around, no more taking a break from doing nothing at all in the lounge. It's sad, but it's true. We are all going to turn into self-centered mugging monsters this semester and no one is going to give a shit about it.

It's just kind of sad, the way I feel when I see my friends on the corridors these days. Before this semester, it was "Hey, there you are!". Right now, it's more like "Oh my, it's been awhile since I saw you!". Very soon, I predict, it is going to be reduced down to just all the "Hi" and all the "Bye", because that is how we degrade to with decrease amount of physical contact. It's like the friends that I haven't seen in a long time, meeting me on the streets in Orchard. You see that person, and the worst part about meeting your long lost friend isn't about how happy you are, but about how awkward it would be if you guys make eye contact, and you are supposed to say something nice about yourself in the middle of the streets when you simply can't say anything more than a "How are you?". I've been in those situations before, and I can't deny that I've told them off by telling them that I was in a hurry to go somewhere, when I wasn't. Sometimes it becomes impulsive to lie, but you can't help it. Awkwardness does something to your rational mind, and you find yourself running away from these old friends because the silence often reminds you just how fucked up you are at maintaining relationships, even the simple ships like friendships.

The name list of my corridor friends is growing, and there isn't anything for me to do to prevent the prophecy of the witch doctor. Every time I am faced with a corridor friend in school, I become reminded of the words that the witch doctor told me. It saddens me to see how our conversations have degraded to just the trivial matters of the day, even the weather in the morning and the timing of the next class. Of course, most of my friends are still close, we are still tight and all. But it's just the thought at the back of my mind, the fear that one day we might end up as corridor friends who try to shun away from each other because we haven't got anything more than a Hi and a Bye to say to each other. Those simple words are words to remind us just how bad we are at maintaining a relationship, how easy it is for us to forget that we have allowed a friend like that to slip by in our lives. The worst part is probably how neither of us can control this bus, how someone is definitely going to get off sooner or later. Damn, I hate that the witch doctor can be right at times, and there isn't any way to prove him wrong either.

I love my friends, in fact they are the reason why the word 'school' and the word 'fun' can appear in the same sentence, such as this one. With our new schedule and the new timetable, it is easy for us to be drowned in our own lives and forget that we had each other in the past. It is always easier to maintain a relationship when we are just corridor friends, it's just the easier way out for most people. Still, I miss those times in the lounge, when we enjoyed our silly moments there and did nothing at all for the majority of the day. Moving from the lounge to the corridors of the school, I still dearly wish for us to remain as friends. Because seriously, even if I have to lose a war to the witch doctor's words, I wouldn't want to lose a battle - I wouldn't want to lose you.