In Continuum.

During the four years of high school, I shared two of them with a guy whose nickname was 'Cuboid'. For a while, everybody called him by his name, and that lasted well until I came into the picture and gave him that nickname, a terminology I learned from one of our geometry classes. The nickname came about because of his somewhat squarish head, and it wasn't helped that his angular skull was further amplified by his hairstyle. With both sides of his hair shaved off, he looked somewhat like a marine of sorts, only with a much softer face and none of that toughened look. He was the target of all our jokes, though he did have a few friends in class whom he'd play Chinese chess with during recess and after school just to kill time. But even those friends of his never gave up the opportunity to poke fun at him when it does arise, and none of us were remotely threatened by the fact that he knew Taekwondo as well as he knew how to breathe. He was a harmless guy, in retrospect, but everybody just disliked him for some reason. 

It is a cruel society in a high school, you are either the predator or the prey. Everybody had to take sides, it was a day to day struggle for the fittest. The food chain extended from the very top of the pyramid to the very bottom, with the latter filled with people with strange hair cuts, accents, looks, dirty uniforms, or those who were exceptionally smart. Cuboid was incredibly smart, and maybe that was why he was the butt of all our jokes, and it wasn't helped by the fact that he was not the best looking person around at all. His facial features were flat as a chopping board, teeth arranged in a fashion to mimic that of a train-wreck, and he had a high-pitched laughter that sounded somewhat like a mating goose. Underneath our jokes and all our pranks, most of us felt a deep sense of guilt. Guilt, for putting him on our chopping boards, but then it's not like most of us had much of a choice back then. It was either with the predators, or against them, and none of us were willing to hang our necks out there for someone like him. 

I remember there was this one time when the class decided to do that pencil case joke they pulled on me when it was my turn to be the human sandbag a long time before. Someone took his pencil case and started throwing it around, but nobody wanted to be the one to give it back to him, nobody wanted to be the wet blanket. The wet blanket always ended up being sucked dry and burned at the end of the day, which was why nobody ever gave the pencil case back to the poor victims. It was tossed around over our heads and kicked around under our feet, the people in my class treated it like a soccer ball when it most obviously did not look like one at all. He'd be doing his flying Taekwondo kicks along the aisles, but it only provoked even more laughter amongst the bullies of the class. In the end, he managed to get his pencil case back, with half his stationery broken, and the bottle of oil he uses to wake himself up in class, shattered into a dozen pieces. It was a bad day for him, and an even worse day for all those with a guilty conscience. But we kept our silence, remained in the corner of the classroom while we watched. It was the best we could do, it was the best that anybody could do. Until one day, Cuboid decided to stand up for himself.

It was when a teasing went overboard, and he decided that it was time to start playing offense on the ball court. He started hopping around on the spot, moving about with his arms raised before his face in a defense position, and his eyes transfixed on the class bully at the other end of the aisle who had the pencil case in his hands. He charged up towards the bully at full speed, took off from the ground halfway down the aisle and performed his flying kick towards the chest with eagle-eye precision. The bully was knocked back, flew towards the cupboard at the back of the class and slapped into the metal doors with a loud bang, the pencil case rolled out of his palms and Cuboid was not Cuboid, anymore. He returned back to the name that people used to call him, with his respect earned and reputation restored. That was the day, when the guilt-ridden lot of us went up to him to apologize for our past deeds, for we were also victims long before it was his turn. We were also scared, too afraid to stand up for ourselves, too weak.

He forgave the lot of us, and we became good friends afterwards. The chess games resumed, his pens and pencils never got broken again. He bought a new bottle of those oil you put around your nose to wake yourself up, the kind that smells like an expired bottle of vinegar. It was amazing how friendships could be rebuilt by a single word like 'Sorry', or 'I didn't mean it' in the past when everything was much less complicated. Maybe it was the environment we were in, how boys tend to have an easier way of dealing with things. You can always kick somebody in the balls and still be friends tomorrow if you offer him to join your team in a friendly basketball game. It was possible in the past, but I guess it is one of those trade-offs you get as you grow older. Things become more complicated, more subtle, and the simplicity in human relationships is gone forever.

I don't know why I suddenly thought of my friend, Cuboid. Perhaps it is the distance I have been feeling from everyone, a strange urge and need to distance myself perhaps. It is one of those self-defense mechanisms that kick in automatically, and you can't help but wonder in times like these, where have all the good times gone? The kind of simplicity involved in making friends even after kicking each other in the nuts, the kind of bonds created even after nasty words were thrown in the air about one another. It is true that as we grow older, we are more equipped to handle our troubles even if they grow to become more complicated with time. Still, nostalgia sets in at times, and you just look back into the past and long for the simplicity in everything. Not just in conflicts in between friends, but life as a whole. When everything was about going to school and trying to survive it, none of the other issues we have to face as the so-called young adults. I wonder how Cuboid is right now, if he is still looking at life and relationships the same way as he used to, the kind of simplicity and benevolence he possessed. So many of us lost that part of our innocence, I wonder if he, still, holds it true to himself despite all the growing up that he has went through - what we've all went through.