Besides the T-shirt delivery, that is.
He's a different person, even though he's in all ways the same. He hasn't changed; my perceptions have shifted.
That piano he made out of wax. It reminds me of how high he has risen, how far he has flown; his work stands on display. He isn't the same person. Just as that piano's existence makes me think of the shifting times and the days we left behind, the piece in itself is a recount almost nostalgic; it fills in the gaps of the story that I never knew, the gaps that riddled those two years without meeting.
I know I am a tiny part of that story, and I even remember where I came in. Somewhere around high C, with the clips. Those silly, silly days. Getting childishly angry over his equally-childish obnoxiousness. Brief admirations. Music.
The wonders of social media. It's almost as if there weren't any of the years in between this meeting and the last. But there's something of those years we missed, that singing of something I let slip, dreams lost in translation.
---
Today, I met a teacher who taught me History in Secondary Three. He remembers me because I was a strange person with some sort of non-academic talent in art? music? that no one could harness properly. Or maybe because I once threw a water bottle at him. I wonder.
He tells us of the things that have been happening recently in RGS. Has it been a year since I sang that school song for the last time? Life lies before us, here's luck to the start. It's changed so much; people I once knew are leaving; people I don't know have come.
It's funny to hear stories of RGS. Your time is done and you have left it forever. But life moves on, things continue to happen within its walls, regardless of your absence. Sometimes you return, and realise it's farther down the current from where it was when you left it, and will never return to that place. But we all retain memories, and some pieces are bound to be trapped here and there, in the dusty corners of the school.
I remember the lab where I first made lead iodide. I remember the pigeons in the canteen. I remember the grand piano in the foyer with the broken F string.
It's funny, how far behind the memory of RGS Batch '10 has been left. At least it still means something. At least our History teacher still remembers, and he says we have changed less than we would think.
History teacher. It makes strange sense.
---
Today, I went to a place I last visited in March 2010 to practise a duet. My friend's home. So many things there are identical to before--but today, I looked closer. There is so much there that I didn't see before; was all that there the last time I came? Which of those things were added by 2011? I always wonder, and maybe I'll regret not looking last time. But that chance won't come again.
She told me of things that happened while I was in her class last year, things I never knew. Now we no are longer that close, it almost seems alien to hear of what was happening when we were still, things that started and ended, and never crossed my path till now.
I remember only the piano from that last visit in 2010. Today I discovered, she's changed that piano for a newer one. Isn't that strange?
---
Like the paradox of Theseus' Ship, I am unsure if I can call them the same entities, since they are still the same by name. Or have their parts changed so much that they are not the same things; are they in fact different? Completely? Partly?
Both my artist friend and my teacher have deactivated their Facebook accounts. Another lesson. They move along, and now I will know nothing of their lives. Without technology, I am stripped bare in terms of links to these people. How much wider does the seam tear? I do wonder. Wide?
All of this, I encapsulate and bury. It's a little like what this blog is meant for. It keeps imprisonments of old times, some that enter by accident--some of which I treasure, some of which I wish I didn't have to recall.
All those things, so many things, could have been--but I tossed them away before I took hold of them, they took hold of me--the music of long ago. Choices and random events are continuously passing us by, each leading to a different Somewhere. Maybe if only. If only I'd hung onto some chances, and discarded others. If I'd been a little more truthful. If I'd gone home an hour later on the fifteenth of July. If I'd gone left around the staircase instead of right.
But music, always music. Play with passion, until the concerto ends, and your solo closes everything. No regrets, because the piece is played and the notes have been sounded. Every mistake becomes part of that unique piece of music that only you, at that point, in that state, could have performed. It's quite beautiful.
