Jordan recently found my old blog that I had created when I was eleven. It reminds me of the past, it feels like a time long gone.
While my secondary school days are pretty far behind too, I still have clear memories of them. Many of the friends I am closer to today are friendships forged from those days, so it really still does feel like a part of my life.
I was in jps before nh, but that is so far gone and I don't even remember the names and faces of people I have met then anymore, so it really doesn't matter all that much to me.
I'm not sure what I feel about my days in nhps though.
I think this feeling, it is the feeling of being haunted.
I have memories of those days, and I remembered that they were brilliant.
Rubber band fights, the line catching, screaming 胡闹, 菊花吃人, bus rides home.
Math files, social studies portfolios, logic math questions with gauss theorem and what not, almost every single one of the teachers
The terrible relief teacher that made the class protest, throwing a toy moose with a hard nose at a pregnant teacher, almost being dragged to the principal's office
Banana huts, chicken rice every single day, entiregamesworlds we created in our notebooks
Worlds created. I still do it. I still have a couple of fantasy worlds living in my head, and sometimes I still hope that one day they can exist in reality, perhaps in the form of a game world for people to explore. It startles me that these worlds have been living in my head for a decade.
But that's besides the point.
These memories, they tell me that my time in nhps meant something to me. They were an integral part of my life. Those days past had played an important role in forging who I am today.
It is haunting. Something that had fundamentally been such an important part of my life should still be so. Yet it isn't, it just feels but like a distant, mostly forgotten past. There is that dissonance.
It is the recognition that something that was once part of me, that was once perhaps my everything, has passed away without even my knowledge.
All that is left is faint memories. Things I vaguely remember but have probably been distorted by the passage of time. Some might point out that I still have friends from those days, but well, they don't feel like friends from those days. It just so happens that we too knew each other then.
So I stare at the old blog and realise that it is perhaps that one relic of the past that I have. It's old, and the song on it doesn't even play anymore. Yet as I stare at the familiar background and the text scrolling, the song starts playing in my heart. It may not be representative of the current reality, but it certainly brings back the old sentiments.
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