Phonebook

This post would have been made two nights ago (when I'd really have meant it) if I hadn't got all dizzy and tired from drinking at Shaoyi's. It could have been made last night if I hadn't spent all evening out at a Turkish restaurant having my birthday dinner. But it will only be made now, late though it is. Sometimes that is the story of life; that things are done, things are realised too little too late. But perhaps the beauty of it lies therein, because the mixture of regret and wistfulness gives the emotion a profoundness that makes it lasting and residual. It is something you cannot so easily let go of, and hence you will hold the subject of your wistfulness dearer to your heart.

Crying in the cinema while watching a romance movie is one thing. For starters, that is vicarious. Crying because of something you are yourself involved in is quite another. Before Friday, I hadn't done that for so long I'd lost count of how many years it had been since the last time. Certainly, I had not counted on spoiling my clean sheet on my 18th birthday. Think about it: effeminate behaviour on the day of your attainment of manhood. Maybe it was ordained to be that way to make it all the more special. What happened was undeniably Romantic in that it defied any form of rational or causal understanding I retrospectively applied to it. My mind oscillated between joyous gratitude and regretful sadness (purportedly at two extremes), without stopping anywhere in between them on the emotional scale. In a way the teardrops were a magic carpet allowing me to bypass everything in the middle as I oscillated back and forth (you only cry at emotion's extremes, yes?), although the thought of doing that must defy any sense of progressive or positivist logic.

It had seemed normal enough. I opened my fridge when I got home to see a Hilton cheesecake. I found a new Samsung phone on my bed. I wasn't surprised, nor do I particularly enjoy being surprised. My parents cannot keep secrets properly. I was even looking forward to the class party (don't quite know why, never was I that enthusiastic about 6.14). I managed to disintegrate a mere hour later, remain that way for a further hour, and then compose myself again to trip to Shaoyi's house. I am still trying to figure out how everything happened. I am not the type to cry. Certainly not for sentimental reasons. How did I do it that evening? And, following which, how did all that emotion that coursed through me dissipate in 48 hours?

My old phone was really falling to bits and so it made sense to switch immediately to the new one. This is where it began I guess. The data (contacts etc.) I had were stored in my old phone and not in my SIM card, which meant I had to transfer everything across. I had had the old phone for some 4 years and going through the contact list I spent 4 years adding to but not subtracting from was bound to be a nostalgic process. Indeed it was. I saw, one by one, excruciatingly, the names of all the old friends and classmates I had lost touch with. People who had once been part of my thoughts, my feelings, my actions, my life, who now were reduced to one-dimensional memories. I didn't waste my time transferring their details of course, but something then hit me. What if of those people whose details I was transferring, more than half would be consigned to the dustbin of memory when I next switched phones? All the images of fun, of meaning, of friendship reducing themselves to the impersonal expression of a name. I recalled all the "keep in touch"s and "friends forever"s I'd written during the day, and stared at the names of all my P6 friends I'd said the same things to 6 years ago. I barely knew them anymore, these people who once told me "Don't forget me when you become rich and famous". I promised, but apparently I didn't even need that long to renege on it. The collective sum of those old friendships lost overwhelmed me. The fear that it would all happen again with my current crop of friends weighed upon me. Then the tears did flow.

It took me a while to get round to the fact that these are friendships I will be in a position to sustain. We will all leave school together but there's nothing stopping us from talking to one another. What gave me this realisation, though, was the dawning upon me of relationships for which the opposite is true. Man learns in binaries, you see. I scrolled down my contact list and stopped at the name of my History teacher. Seeing next to hers the name of my Primary 6 form teacher, I then realised. It is my relationships with my teachers, the teacher-student relationships, that imminently cease to be. These are the things that really were broken when school closed. I had left, but they remained as part of, as fixtures in, the school. I pondered on the nobility of their role. Every year graduating students invariably experience this nostalgia and sadness because they are really leaving for good. Yet the teachers have to bear witness, a part and not really a part of the experience, with their own emotional bonds and their professional capacities at odds with each other. They are left out of the moment by the sad fact that next year it will happen all over again. This day of special significance is one whose feeling they are almost unable to partake in. Each year they send their students, the finished articles of their labour of love, off to better and brighter futures. Each year ends with them knowing they return to the head of the circle to start all over again, any progress the previous year chalked off like the wrenching off of an old calendar. They witness their students moving on to better futures that eluded them in their own lives. And yet they witness it with joy, with satisfaction, with not a hint of jealousy or sadness. How awesome that is! I mentioned earlier about romantic love in films and how its nobility makes you feel touched and want to cry. But that sort of love is incomparable to the one teachers have for their students. With romance you love only one person because of certain features the person has or because of certain things the person has done in the past for you. Teachers love their students. Period. Unconditionally, for the simple fact that we are their students, for that we only share one bond with them - a common humanity. The simplicity of it all is profoundly touching.

And yet on the last day of school we went canvassing for one another's "autographs" or signatures in our yearbooks. We went around as though we'd never be the same with our friends again. We got it wrong. It's the "Teachers" chapter whose final fullstop had been penned, it is them who deserve the spots of remembrance in our yearbooks. Pity I realised too little too late.