After a filling lunch at Thomson Plaza, though it was affectionately called Yaohan those days, we walked along Thomson Rd. I was walking with my best friend on a lazy sunny afternoon.
But 10 years back, we both would have been in school uniforms. The Church and the post office are still there, but gone is the MacDonald's where we spent much of our youths in. The shophouses and the canal are still there but gone is my size 27 waistline. The sweet feeling of being in the most comfortable company in the whole wide world was still there, but both of us have been through much in the last 10 years. So essentially we are the same, but not.
Whilst we still reminisce about loving and gushing about the Backstreet Boys, we don't actually listen to them much anymore. The realness of the past is alluring, but one cannot ignore the lucidity of the present and future. As much as the romantic in me wants to hope all is the same, it isn't and it can never be.
I'm not saying it in a bad cynical and jaded manner, it is just the gradual realisation that we cannot build too much of the present on the past. They are but memories; the danger is when we live in them so much that the current circumstance becomes irrelevant. Rather I should focus more on building a future with what I do in the present.
A visiting Vietnam acquaintence shared with me over dinner that he threw all the keepsakes away from his ex-girlfriend. That's because, he said, that if those memories are really worth something, then he can build new ones in future and not needing physical 'things' to remind him of a past now gone.
I must admit I don't fully agree but I guess it is a nice reminder.
But whatever the case, standing waiting for the traffic light to change at that very same traffic junction with my best friend, was nice. More than nice.
I guess there are some memories after all worth holding on to.
