This Is When My Youth Ends

It's quiet at night here, where I am sitting facing my laptop screen, with only the sound of distant crickets and the soft blowing of the fan. It's pretty sudden, the missing, the aching, the pining of times past, of lost memories and childhood and those phone conversations we had in the past. I suddenly remember those moments so many years ago when I was seventeen, hiding in the dark downstairs with the cordless phone in the house, dodging my parents and their squealing and complaints of the exorbitant amount the phone bills always came up to.

Funny. Back then it felt like a task, like mission impossible playing in my life.

But I miss those moments most. I mourn the loss of my youth with the realisation that my childhood friends are getting hitched. I had a very good friend back in Form 6, when I was eighteen. I struggled all through Form 6, because of the many issues I had and stumbling in between the psychiatrist's office and home, I found my way into his car in the late evenings, spending hours upon hours with plain conversations. The attraction was there, I suspected, but it remained a platonic friendship, and one I certainly miss. Where are those days now? Why must every single male-female friendship these days seem more complicated than they ever were?

I recall those days with a smile. I'd mention his name, this friend of mine who always had a joke on his lips every single day, entertaining everyone including himself. His best skills were playing the guitar, running and football. Remember the song "Pupus"? Until today it's stuck in my head because of you. And I recall those days when we were close, when he and I were friends, when he cheered me up simply when I was down. I always thought those days would never end. But they did. They ended when I left town, and I never really came back. Sure, I did, every once in a while, but I never saw him. It's funny. I don't even remember how he looks like now. The only remains of his memory is this medal he dedicated to me, hanging from the mirror in my room at home. How I miss his smile, his laughter, his warmth. And this aching is multiplied now that I met someone who reminds me of him.

There were also those days, remember? Of spending them with her in the public library after school every single day. We'd study and laugh, and spent our evenings sitting outside the library making silly antics that others would hopefully find bizzarre. There was also "tok kura-kura", remember? This old man with his bicycle whom we thought resembled "tok kura-kura" from Dragonball so much. I miss him. I miss seeing him with his steady old bicycle, riding past every day. Remember when it rained, back then? We'd fold our pants up and play in the rain. If it became flooded, even the better. We'd skip in the knee-high water, and splashed our worries away. I remember how you felt when you suffered loss. We spoke about your mother a lot, remember? I wanted so badly to wipe your ache away, but all I could do was to sit beside you while you cried. We became best friends that way, you and I. How I miss those days. And how I miss you.

What changed, I wonder? I look back on all these years and I can't seem to point to a day when everything started morphing into the complexity of what it is today. I miss you. Please come back. Come home to me. But you can't. The days are gone, and this is how I will be spending the rest of the days. This is when my youth ends: with friends building families, lost childhood memories, and old flames settling down for good. For good, of course.

But if he ever did, I don't know how I will ever take it.