looking back for a moment

This evening, I met up with Junior College friends I had not seen in years. The last time we gathered was probably on our graduation day, slightly more than 6 years ago. Since then, the occasional spying on facebook was the only thing that kept me updated on their lives, a peek at and a measure of their success or the lack thereof.

What or how much can you expect from people you've not seen in years? I kept my expectations low, and factored in leeway for stilted, awkward, lame conversations as well as several sneaky-roll-my-eye-moments.

But all that preparation was to come to naught because everyone had grown up and I thought they had become rather nice, respectable men and women. Sure, they were still 'same old'; one cannot easily shake off traits that have become such an innate part of us. But theirs were faces and hearts cast in new bodies, thinking minds shaped and re-shaped perhaps by university education, working experiences and of course, the mandatory national service for the boys.

Conversation and 6 year old jokes flowed freely as we tucked into a simple meal at a Japanese curry chain restaurant. If our curry was thick, our friendship was thicker. Not in the way that we would selflessly render help to one another; our commitments were in another world, really. Our relations were like old, coagulated clotted cream preserved in a time box with no expiry date, unchanged by the number of years that had passed. There was no need for re-introductions, I knew everyone as I had known them before.

Once dinner was over, we adjoined to a lovely cafe for desserts. The tall ceilings and high walls made me feel like I was walking back into a colonial wonderland fit only for British masters. Outside, the al fresco area was lined with tall trees around a water feature and I could not help but feel like we were at that moment metaphorically 'growing up'. The blob of clotted cream was melting into a mess of mismatched black leather sofas and rattan chairs, dissolving our gender clusters. Our conversation was different too, there is only so much reminiscing one can do. We talked about politics, the economy, our future lives, Japan, what we hopped to do, our passions, our examinations, our work and mostly, how life was ultimately tough. - cue "What do you do with a B.A in English" -  And as we chattered, we inevitably verbalized the missing bits and pieces the rest of us had not been there to witness, sneak peeks into our real lives outside of the P.S cafe.

The bill for dessert was twice that of dinner's, but by the end, the melted clotted cream had melded into another shape. And as we bid our farewells, goodbyes and made promises to meet again, I knew that it was time to store our newly formed blob of clotted cream into the another time box, one with no expiry date, to be opened the next time we were to meet.