Yet He Remembered

I took quite a while to come up with the title of this post, because I am not sure of how I feel or how I should feel...

After months of planning and having plans destroyed by the interruptions of work and sheer laziness, I finally dropped by campus on Saturday, and quite a bit has changed, some portions are almost beyond recognition.

It is really the same with the rest of this country. No one can really drive for 15 minutes without seeing some construction, renovation or replacement taking place. It is always in some process of renewal; trapped and trapping ourselves in a flux, washing us along, struggling to keep itself abreast of the times...

Here, there is nothing to really remind us that this place is home or that it is really alive except for the constant change around us; faceless people are always playing musical chairs in different lives, leaving little for the mind to cling onto, somewhat resembling background static, incoherent and droning monotonously on...

I guess this is a place that we can regularly get lost and feel lost... and there is really little that we can hold on to except for this strange sense of loss and a subtle longing for some things that we cannot really remember.

It is a profound experience actually, feeling a sense of loss for something you constantly wonder if you ever really had experienced... akin to gradual amnesia, perhaps reminisent of Parkinson's. I returned as I had in the past five years, hoping to find a friend there, but he had left. And with his leaving, most memories of me that resides in the campus should be swept away as well.

At least that is what I thought, until the drinks seller remarked that it has been a long time since I visited.

He went on to ask if I am still involved in logistics. I remembered him, but it was a shock that he remembered me, despite serving hundreds of new faces everyday and thousands of new faces every year. My visits to the campus were always to look for another, and when I did speak to this store holder, it was never more than the usual polite chat... yet he remembered.

What can I say?

I spoke little to him because he is often critical and cynical about the campus management, but are we all not equally frustrated? And what we spoke about, does not differ much from year after year. And I should be nothing more than the person that appears once in a long while for a quick chat about nothing much... nothing more.

Yet, he remembered.

Often as we drift through our lives, we may desire anonymity, sometimes a silent passing, or perhaps, solitude... but I guess we can never be sure in whose hearts we leave our footsteps. So while progress beckons, it may not a bad idea to retrace one's steps once in a while to find out if there are memories waiting to be revisited.