To: VV

(This article is dedicated to a very sweet lady, to whom I made a promise… that promise is now here, in words…
Floreat…)

It is strange when a building can evoke in you a response all out of proportion with the occasion. Was it because the building was my alma mater, or was it because it was the 25th anniversary of the school? Was it because I was compere, same as I was for the last three years of school life?

Or was it…?

Was it because the same, beautiful girl who’d stood next to me one that last Annual Day was standing next to me this time also?

Can time juxtapose feelings? Can a place carry memories? Maybe all the lives that passed through that old school building left their traces… imagine…
The lives, the games, the loves and the crushes of thousands of students, left behind in names scratched on fading paint, in marks on trees and in smashed glass…maybe those memories can talk…

And maybe they did talk, to me, yesterday… Another scene played itself out to me as I stood there, announcing the day’s schedule. The scene of a youth, torn between love and despair, standing mute, wondering whether to grieve at the end of his school days or to grieve at the fact that he would be leaving someone behind…someone just an arm’s length away, and a truth waiting to be told…

Strange…

I wondered how we all change, how something that could’ve meant life or death to me in school, was now something for me to smile at, as a fallacy of my jeunesse dorée. A smile must have come on to my face, or the beginning of tears, I don't know.

But people were looking at me, and so, memories of love put aside, another (though less truthful) smile on my face, I went ahead

and announced the next program.

Strange…