True Friendship

True friendship is a rare moment of epiphany when one stumbles on others and the first thing that goes thru one’s mind is,

‘OMG! There are actually people like me….I am not so weird after all!…I m not alone any longer.

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‘There are not many people who have lived my kind of life. Not at all…there are many who may claimed too. Then there are those who claim to know those who might have….but for most people, they just go to University, study really hard for three or four years. Maybe pursue a master’s after that as a topping and for most of them, they just return back home and get ordinary jobs, where eventually they put a down payment on a house and dream one day to own a car…that’s really the typical life cycle of a Singaporean salary man.

I am not saying that is necessarily good or bad…that’s just the normal run of the mill sort of life that most people choose to call the sum of their existence.

For me life is very different as you can see….and although, I don’t write as often as I should about how this difference imposes it’s own reality on my consciousness and touches every aspect of my life…this doesn’t mean I am not haunted by the life choices that I’ve made to live such an unusual life….For most the time, I do what I need doing very much like a man marooned in my own mind like probably Robinson Crusoe…at times, like all stranded souls, my eye is naturally drawn to the horizon. But that impulse soon passes as I make every effort to remind myself that’s an acquired taste…a remnant from the past when I was indelibly another man living another life.

I tell myself frequently. Usually when I struggle with shavers that rust faster than usual in the high humidity of the omnipresent jungle…it’s normal for a man in a deserted island to scan endlessly for phantom ships across the horizon. That’s how it is.

But from time to time. Not very often. I do chance across souls such as myself. Sometimes they seek me out. It’s a vampire thing. Two souls drawn magnetically to each other by an invisible force that only they can sense while the others remain oblivious to the existence of such compelling attraction.

Only whenever we find each other – we never ever talk. Never…otherwise the magic spell would be broken.

I wouldn’t exactly call it solidarity or camaraderie. Maybe, we share a common crie de couer, but that is really all there is…a brief feeling of familiarity that’s so fragile like a spider’s web or the morning gloss of dew – like when a man walks by a window. For a brief moment, he doesn’t quite recognize himself, then very slowly between the distance of two lamp post, it dawns on this man, it’s him…and this is his life and he’s glad to be part of it and with these thoughts, the world gushes back into the momentary darkness of the twilight of this man’s life….a man with no name.’