The One with the Baseball Cap.

Today I spoke with a boy after 6 long years, a boy whose name had meant furtive phone calls, shy smiles and then some. We talked about the people we used to be, the places we left and the people we knew. We talked about how we faded into the silence with all our awkward growing pains. I think I’m the jerk who stopped talking first. I’m sorry!

So we talked about the things we missed out on in each other’s lives. He tells me he misses this country. But it’s not the country that you miss. It’s our little colony atop Toh Tuck and Bukit Tinggi. From up above, our microcosm was sheltered from the ground below. I know so. I live here and I feel home sick for that place on a hill that no longer exist. Its constituent parts had dispersed with a burst, lodging the shrapnel pieces all over the world. I miss it too.

We’re a little taller, a little less shy and a whole lot different and yet we’re still two kids talking on MSN late into the night because neither one of us can sleep. Words flowed out easily like an open faucet because like Corrinne Bailey Rae once said:

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Don’t you think it’s strange?

There is a greater magnetic force that’ll bring us back to a place somewhere in the world just for a little while. It’ll happen when all of us have grown a little more and garnered the ability to jump on planes on a heart’s whim. Because that’s what families do: reunite and disperse in bursts of laughter, tears and pain.