| Rant : Close The Door, I'm Already Gone Quite often, I find myself having to say goodbye to something before I�m actually ready. And because I was never really ready to bid that fond farewell, I end up looking back with a sense of longing. Being the sort of person that I know I am, I was fully prepared to employ some friends to drag me out of my university dormitory, load me onto the airport coach, tie me to the seat if necessary, meet me at the airport with tennis rackets, whack me on the head till I was unconscious, and then load me onto the plane, with boxes of tissue paper by my side, just in case I woke up in mid-flight and started bawling with the energy of fifty babies. Then someone also suggested that I go see a hypnotist, to get him to make my consciousness of the past three years disappear. You can�t miss something if that something never happened, can you? Okay now, before you mistake me either for being high or moonlighting as the scriptwriter for the sequel to �The Matrix�, let�s just get on with the gist of this rant. Nobody expects anybody who is somebody (oh dear, here I go again) to not have attachment to people and places. After all, I did spend three years of my life in a certain university town, doing certain university things which rather often (though not too often) actually included studying and attending lectures. And it�s silly to want to erase all the memories simply because you�re afraid to miss something. I guess to miss something just makes us human. It shows we�re capable of being attached to things, of having emotions, and that the incident where I ran through the hallway dead drunk and said �I love you� to every single person I met along the way did indeed happen. Or so some people would have me believe. I still deny it, instead putting the blame on Mad Dawg, my long-lost twin. And so when several people asked me, some months back, if I would miss the place that I�ve called home for the past three years, I laughed it off with an emphatic �Of course!� I thought that I would cry, I thought that I would take a slow walk through the busy streets of the university town in high summer, just taking everything in and breathing. Not really thinking, but more like feeling. I thought that I would miss the musty smell of the pub down the street, I thought that I would miss the feeling of people knocking on your door and you�re never sure who it would be on the other end � but you knew it could never be your parents, I thought that I would miss sleeping till lunchtime (oh wait, hang on, erase that!), I thought that I would miss a million things. Once I even thought that I might miss the English weather, then I realized that I was running a temperature, so my brain cells were probably a bit disoriented. But the strange thing was this: I didn�t cry, I didn�t walk down the streets acting like a pretentious brat, and I didn�t (and still don�t) really miss the whole she-bang. I mean, I do miss sleeping till lunchtime for one thing, but it�s not something you�d cry about, and it�s not something confined to that certain country � it�s not like everyone in that country sleeps till lunchtime, so it wasn�t a cultural thing. But this is not to say that I didn�t enjoy my last three years. Indeed, those were great times, and there were so many moments I continue to cherish. It did strike me as a little bizarre that it was that easy to let go. Perhaps it was because of this. One day, I was pottering around in my room, having just eaten breakfast (this was around two in the afternoon, by the way) when I started having a conversation with a friend of mine. I was deciding where to go for my summer vacation, and the choice was down to Scandinavia versus the East Coast of the United States. And my friend just told me that it didn�t matter where I went, as long as I knew that it was going to be my last extended, carefree holiday for a long, long time � and that I should also take the opportunity to gain some sort of closure over the events of the past three years. That word: Closure. There was a period of time in my life when I was quite enchanted by the whole aura of that word. And then it became one of those words that got thrown around so much that I�d roll my eyes whenever it came up in conversation. In fact, I might have even half-rolled my eyes when my friend mentioned the word, if not for my fear that my friend would smack me right there and then. But for some inexplicable reason, it sort of made sense. You see, prior to that, whenever I went on holiday during my university term breaks, I would tell any and all who would listen my story, which strangely enough, usually incorporated a large chunk of my university life. But this time round, telling my story felt slightly different. I was telling it like it was a phase of my life that was already over, that had been good while it lasted, and I was standing on the precipice of the next phase, and seeing it all open up scarily in front of me. In fact, despite the fact that Britney Spears has forever disrupted my usage of the word, I was standing at a crossroads of my life. And because I calculated my travels at the point when certain planets aligned and stars flared across the northern skies (I ended up going to Scandinavia), the powers that be somehow arranged that I would meet, and get along with, certain other people who, like me, were sitting, looking out at their next phase in life with a mixture of wonder, amazement and trepidation. I was also shitting my pants over my exam results, and it felt good to be able to speak about my hopes and dreams and fears to people who had either gone through the same or were going through the same. It made it easier to deal. In some sense, by talking about it like it were the past, I had already said goodbye to it all. Maybe someday I will tell all of you the stories about the people I met on my holiday. But I�d already said my goodbyes to them � David, Anne, Simon, Raph � just like I�d said goodbye to my university years. Somehow I was ready to do that, without knowing then that I already had. |