In Continuum.

It's strange, but that is how I feel, and I am sure she feels the same sentiments. It is kind of like how dream-time works different than real-time, where an hour in real-time may translate to a whole week in dream-time. It does seem like we have known each other forever, sharing the same liking for Japanese puddings and both disliking the idea of being immersed in a crowd of perfect strangers. In truth, there are just some people that you come across in life, people you know who are going to stick around for a very long time. I got the same vibe with only so many people, those who are still sticking around because they care, because they like the way that you are and you like the way that they are. It is this special thing, this space in between that people share, it's unique in a sense that it cannot be recreated with anybody else. Relationships like that do not get replaced, but they do falter if not handled properly. They are like those multi-colored bubbles, the giant ones you blow out through the plastic loop. You see the colors change shapes on the surface of the bubble, and from underneath it'd seem so beautiful. But you know, no matter how many more bubbles you blow, the patterns are never going to be the same again. 

I used think that I am only lousy at intimacy, but there are times when I feel that I am worse at friendship. You cannot blame anybody for changing, for relationships to falter and change. It happens, it always does, and nobody should be pointing fingers. There have been so many people that mattered, and so many of those people matter little at this point in time. You meet someone through a friend, from school, and they matter a lot to you for some time because you find them so infinitely exciting to talk to. Then something happens, it's the cruelty of life, and then you guys talk so much that there isn't anything to talk about after some time. I regret being the one leaving, but then I have been the one being left behind as well. Sometimes you try so hard to keep a relationship going, and you thought it'd be easier with friends instead of a lover. It's harder at times, there are no obligations to one another, you change when you want and however you want. No one knows what is going to happen two, five, or ten years down the road with the both of you. It's kinda like how 90% of the animals that ever existed on this planet are extinct now. The same can be said about friends, because I dare to  predict that the same percentage of friends you had ten years ago aren't around you, any longer. 

It rained for the most part of the morning on Thursday, and I was wondering if it was going to spoil anything for the rest of the afternoon. We are both lovers of rain, but the town during a storm isn't a place you want to be trapped in, despite my cool spring loaded umbrella and her posh Japanese umbrella. The cab ride in the morning due to the bus that was forty minutes late did not stop me from spending another awful lot of money on a cab ride down to town after school. I didn't want her to wait, it'd be impolite. We only had the afternoon anyway, parents are such irritating creatures when it comes to the time their children get home. We didn't have a plan, I didn't have a plan. It was all about where our noses wanted to lead us, or our stomachs for the most part. The craving for pizza eventually led us to a random Pizza Hut I never knew existed, then to the shelves of toys in Toys R Us which I didn't know existed in Paragon either (Come on, it is tucked away in a corner of the highest floor). From there, the craving led to a coffee bean downstairs and, eventually, to City Hall where the craving for fast food wasn't exactly satiated. The initial mission to look for a birthday present eventually dissolved into aimless wandering around my most hated shopping mall, but that mattered little. I mean, I was in Malaysia two years ago, but my friends made it all OK. Yeah, it was all OK. 

If anything goes wrong in town, evacuate yourself into the nearest bookstore or Coffee Bean, and you shall not go wrong. Even if the waiter trips and breaks a whole tray of bowls and cups on your table, it is OK with great company. Macbook itself is hours of fun, even more fun when we attempted to change the colors of every Mac in an Apple distributor. Funny how we spotted a few people using a Mac with the colors inverted, but we ran away from the crime scene like children who's just left a bag of dog poop outside someone's door. It was fun while it lasted, but even more so when you laugh uncontrollably over the lame trick I did with a ten dollar note. On my defense, I didn't come up with that myself, but E-Fei who looked so proud with that trick himself. Amidst the soft toy throwing and putting ridiculous looking roses on her head, the spaces in between were occupied mostly by lightsaber fights to the death, and the lyrics of childish nursery rhymes. My impulse took us to City Hall, where I made the both of us walk down long busy streets at the peak hour, through narrow corridors to Davis, a brief jam on a Takamine guitar (which was surprisingly good), and then having to make a detour around a bunch of concrete barricades because of the stupid F1 race happening next month. 

It was fun while it lasted, but all good things come to an end. The crowd around us built as the offices and the trains unleashed torrents of strangers into the once empty town. So much for the town on a weekday, it really only lasts so long before everybody gets off from work. As if the innocence and the fun has been rudely disrupted, the time ticked by much faster now, when it was moving by at a crawl only hours earlier - and I meant that with all the love, crawl isn't necessarily bad when you are having fun in the context of time. It's great to know, at times, that you still have to capacity to trust somebody out there with everything that is in your mind. You know, somebody else who is willing to just listen, at times. There are others who does the same, but the more the merrier at times, right? I have a best friend to play the guitar with, I have a best friend to have impulsive coffee with. I have a best friend to bitch about school with (not to mention the occasional advices, but mostly bitching anyway), and now I have a best friend undercover, code-named Melon. 

It has been great knowing you, Melon, although I am not sure when these clandestine (I love this word) thing is going to turn into somewhat of a threat to what you hold dear. Either way, I like the way things are now, and I enjoy the fact that you are a friend of mine, met under unusual circumstances indeed. There are people who come and go, they are exciting for a certain amount of time, and they kind of move on with their lives. You can't make yourself stay, and I certainly don't expect that to happen. I have come to an agreement that people do leave, and the ones who stay are merely pleasant surprises. It'd be OK if one day, just one day, the bubble bursts and the colors are no longer. But sticking around would be my business, and I'd keep blowing the bubbles just to catch another sight of those beautiful colors.