Basket.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd

-Alexander Pope

January 2005. Half a month since the big move and everyone is talking about how queer they feel upon seeing "NUS High" (correct me if I'm wrong, I have not personally cast eyes upon it) in place of "Raffles Junior College" at the entrance of the good old Mt Sinai Campus. I wonder how I would feel upon seeing it.

Passed by yesterday as I alighted at Buona Vista on my way back home, but I didn't take the chance. Perhaps I was afraid nostalgia would hit me like a brick. Stepping on that station platform and descending those familiar stairs were bad enough. The gantries I had used so many times and the bridge I used to cross so often remained just as they had been, mute reminders to an era past. The bus stop was exactly as it was; the little stall run by a shopkeeper whom I had always thought bore more than a passing resemblance to Pervez Musharraf locked up - he always closed it in the evenings. The Ministry of Education office building loomed beside; yet no longer as forebodingly as it used to.

I know that area so well, yet when I returned it felt like a friend from many ages past, the relationship long cold and we practically strangers. Despite the No.4 that weighed on me, the army boots I did my best to avoid staining with anything whatsoever and the jockey cap whose one good job was to shade my eyes from the sun, I would have felt like a student again, but the chilly reception the whole area seemed to give me was the most potent dose of reality I could ever hope to get. I no longer know the area, just like I no longer know the friend who used to be so close but now only exchanges the occasional cool "hi" when we pass each other now and again.

And there were, of course, no more familiar figures in white and green scattered all around, waiting, talking, walking, laughing.

Everything was the same, yet everything had changed.

Maybe that is why the past two years seem like all a dream. Surreal, as if it never happened. A fantastic dream I would wake up from and cry because it was such a wonderful experience. Faraway and all in soft tones the memories are.