The Send-Off

So todae was the send-off for 2 of my long-time friends, Xinyin & Judy, 2 cute babes on their way to the hallowed land of the US for their hard-earned work-and-travel program. My gosh, these peers of mine have actually graduated & enjoying the fruits of their labour.. on a journey to a land far away that has great promises in store for them. In perspective, i was part of a rather large send-off group, taking a break in the middle of my semester exams, recharging for my last struggles next week to complete my freshman year. Yeah, that made me feel rather small, but also engendered with a sense of hope and discovery, similar sentiments those 2 babes would be relishing on their long Pacific flight.

Well, the send-off was a rather simple one, not exactly a teary one, not exactly a grand one for they were only to be gone from our spatial comfort zone for 3 months. Somehow, the length of time away is a determinant of the magnitude of the departure, and perhaps thus the send-off. I sometimes wonder how this clashes with the propogated notion of a global village, of us only being a phone call away anywhere in the world, of the irrelevance of spatial distance.

Well actually i do kind of subscribe to the idea that spatial distance is irrelevant to human relations, but not exactly due to the amorphous phenomenon of globalization. Well the most important lesson ive learnt from taking 2 History modules in NUS is that we do not really live because we can feel our hearts beat or see our tummy in that too-tight t-shirt.

We live only in the memories of others, which is made more evident in the metaphor of death, where the departed only lives in our remembrance. Memory, though unobjective and a victim of emotion, is critical in dictating whether people in our lives actually live.

With relevance to myself, yeah i myself am leaving for North Carolina, USA in about 3 months' time, and will be gone for almost a year at least. Today's send-off was an eerie premonition of my own send-off. It seemed eerie to me as it felt like i was attending my own funeral, seeing most of my close friends there, who would most likely constitute my own fare-well if they were free then.

It seemed like a funeral, since if you didnt really make an impact on those around you, your memory in them would gradually die out like a drizzle, and only if you did matter to a certain part of their life and memory did you continue to live, whatever the spatial distance might be. A couple can be just right next to each other, holding hands and walking along town, yet if they weren't really actively re-constructing their memories of each other, they could be as dead as the brown leaves they strolled by, to each other.

It seems like a quirky dilemma, but i guess sometimes it's important to think about what it means to live, only through others? To die, only by perishing the thought that only the self matters?