Buay and I went for a enjoyable swim and a hearty hotel breakfast on Friday morning, before we trod off to work. Our stay-cation was too short but altogether very interesting and different!
Something rather curious happened too, when we made our way out of the island. On the Sentosa monorail platform a guy who was reading the papers glanced up. He noticed us and kept looking here, like he was waiting to be acknowledged. I couldn’t place him. He kept looking at both (not just one) of us, even on the train, and since we’re not the type of girls people check out, we felt rather weird but we pretended not to notice. I only asked Buay when we reached Vivocity and he went out of sight.
I kept thinking about him, until I suddenly remembered who he could be. When we were in JC, there was a pretty girl in class who dated the suave dragon boat team captain. They were one of those golden couples. That guy in the morning looked like an uncle-fied version of that boy!
I texted the clique, thinking I might be able to get a name, find a photo on Facebook and verify, but no one remembered the guy. We were boring, low-profile commoners in school, so now I learned we were really uninterested too haha.
I came back and dug out the year book. There he was. I found his photo on Facebook, thanks to an unusual surname, and he looked like — what can I say? — 31-year-old and a regular family guy. But I still can’t be sure whether he was the one in the morning.
Flipping through the year book for a short 15 minutes brought back memories of many people I’ve long forgotten. A few things dawned on me. At 31, those youthful JC days are a lifetime away. Everyone ages and looks different after more than a decade. You forget popular and celebrated school personalities soon enough if you didn’t know — or like — them very much. And, it’s terribly hard to find people with common names on Facebook or Linkedin.
I’m still trying to come to terms with all those thoughts.
