Nostalgia
“Do you remember the time……” - our conversations didn’t always begin this way. We used to live in the present. There used to never be any time to look back or ahead not only because we were too stoned to coordinate a simple head turn or utilize our short term memory banks but because we were too busy creating times to bother about any that came before or prepare for ones arriving later. Those were the days when we would leave the house before nine in the morning, smoke, snort, sniff, swallow and enjoy as many substances as we could and still make it back home in time for dinner. Those were the days of Dionysian bad habits and extraordinarily good times. A time when reality was inverted and we lived in a bubble of peculiar bliss. But bliss isn’t a sustainable emotion – it renders one oblivious, most of all to the fact that bliss is supposed to be an end, not a means.
Those days have come to an end. Those days are gone, along with a significant amount of my brain cells. And we’re guilty as charged of attempted adulthood…… if not aggravated boredom.
We were standing on Mount Coot-Tha, looking out at the sun setting over
Earlier, on the drive up, he talked of his loss urge to bungee jump, of his sudden concern for safety. When we were not fondly rehashing good old tales of fun times and experiences, he talked of responsibility and job prospects. Of networking and property investment while I tried my best to hold back an armada of yawns. K will be graduating at the end of the semester and just like that, he had turned into someone’s father.
When we first met, he was Mr. Been There, Done That, Let’s Do It Again while I was little Miss Let’s Go There, Wanna Try That, Again! I used to jokingly call him ‘mom’ because he always made sure that I drink enough water, take my vitamins and prevent me from suffering an overdose. Of course, he had always been older than me - by 3 years in numbers and probably 10 in life experience but now he actually seemed old. At the height of our friendship, and friendships, like mountains and sub-cultural movements, do have heights, we were considered by many to be surgically attached at the hips but those stitches must have come apart – we hadn’t really seen much of eachother in the past year. I don’t remember him ever being this serious. He wasn’t humorless or grave, quite the contrary but he was no longer oblivious. You could just tell that his bubble of bliss had burst. And I realised, that mine must have too.
Looking over the city of Brisbane light up in nightfall, made me think of the times we sat on top of Bukit Tunku, watching the city of Kuala Lumpur shower and glow in artificial light, peculiarly blissful, with absolutely no concern over what lay in which direction……. (and whether I remembered to pull up the hand brake when I parked the car on a slope). For a second, I thought I felt grief wash over me, but it was only a pang of nostalgia for nostalgia, like grief, can only be felt for what is recognized as dead, the property of a different time and a past self.
I turned to K and said, “Do you remember the time when we …..” and he nods and finishes my sentence with a laugh. I laughed. He hits me. He has a habit of repeatedly slapping someone on the back when he laughs. I hit him back. And we laughed.
And when we were done laughing at snapshots from the past, we sighed and slowly shook our heads.
Oo err check out the new blog design. What's with the fucking top-secret dossier look? It's called irony, my friends. Are there any kind, non-technologically challenged souls out there that are willing to assist me in creating a template that better reflects the spirit of this blog? No? No?
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