i know I said that you can look forward to some interesting posts on ‘sympathy vs. empathy’ and ‘survival of the fittest’. But something really interesting happened yesterday and i have decided to write about that first…
Yesterday, I went over to my aunt Lily’s place for a BBQ. She lives in KL, where I am studying too, but I haven’t been to her house for more than a year…
I went there not only to see her family and her, but also to meet another aunt, Aunt Christina that I’ve never seen in my entire life… I only knew her through that one card she sends faithfully every Christmas…She lives in
But I finally met her yesterday.
When I first met her, I got this nostalgic feeling and tears welled up in my eyes. I know, you’re probably going ‘Uh?????’
It was this weird feeling… I just understood how everyone there felt…
That night was a reunion of siblings… Aunt lily, Uncle Joe, and Uncle Jack are all aunt Christina’s siblings and have not seen her in over 30 years… Imagine that feeling…Seeing your sister, the one you grew up with, fought with, went through the bad and good times with, and when she chose her path of life, you let her go and had to settle for the once a year phone calls, emails and Christmas card… and after about 30 years, you see her again in flesh and blood….
It’s just a really amazing feeling… I could sense that an invisible distance now exists between them… There’s a feeling of awkwardness, space between them… Trying to pick up where you left 30 years ago, is not easy… Things change, people change, the dynamics of the relationship you share changes…
But I knew,
All that didn’t matter a bit… The difference didn’t matter… What matters is that after 30 years, they were all together again… and that was what cause the tears to well up in my eyes… She showed me pictures of herself when she was younger, pictures that she took with my mom, when they were 16-18 years old…
And I felt it even more…
Mom became an orphan when she was quite young… And these people were her family. I could also see that aunt Christina was my mother’s closest friend… but my mom lost her when she was barely 19… Even before she got married… I could sense a feeling of loss and loneliness in my mother, to lose her best friend and the feeling of losing the only little family she had left… She got married when she was 19 to my dad, started a new family with him but I knew things are not the same… I miss my mom and I see what she went through and how much we (my dad and my siblings and me) probably mean to her, looking at where she came from…
As I looked at them, I wondered about myself, my dad, my mom, my sis, my bro, my
friends, aunts and all the relationships I have created with people…
I wondered how things will be in 40 years…
Dad is almost 60 already. He probably has about 15-20 years left….ONLY…
Mom’s 48…and she getting tired as well, she’s got high BP…
Sister’s rebelling and has got a boyfriend (that I don’t like) and
Brother… I hardly talk to him anymore…
I know that I have very little time to make every second with them meaningful because I’m in kl, studying and now that i‘m planning to my Masters, that means another 4 years of studying…
And then there’s Sim Mei, Amy, Sheikh, Rita, Anand, Gayathri, Dhayalen, Ezekiel…
Who I have grown to be really close to…
I wondered how we will be in 40 years…
If we would have grown apart from each other or if we would have managed to keep in touch and keep our friendship very much alive…
And there are schoolmates, Rohene, Muna, Agkillah, Meng Lin, Raani, Temme…
I haven’t seen Muna in almost a year… She studies in
I do see Rohene and Meng Lin quite often now… but I don’t how much things are gonna change in 40 years time…
I haven’t seen Agkillah in more than a year, although we are both based in KL,
I haven’t seen Raani in months and she’s leaving at the end of the month to
And Temme, I just recently met her after almost 2 years… she’s working now…
I’ve forged many meaningful relationships with people but I wonder where we are going to stand in 40 years time…
If I met them after 40 years, how will we be?
I know, that I wouldn’t care about the awkwardness or the distance…I would be happy just to see them again…
Life is short… Trust me… Way shorter than we may think it is…
So, appreciate every moment you have with the people around you… appreciate every moment you have in life… Take no one and nothing for granted… Not even the sunrise, the breeze… Cause u’ll miss it when it’s no longer around….
40 years on..
I'll be 62 and you'll be 60.
We'll have grandkids all around us trying to get our attention.
We'll laugh about the silly things we did in University, and how we used to pile things on our plate (both food and non-food)
We'll talk about the trips we've made, to interesting places around the world.
"Remember Bali? That hot
guy? *wink wink*
"Remember the road trip we made around Malaysia? The lembu we almost ran into?"
We'll both laugh about our husbands' idiosyncrasies and worry about our unmarried children.
But most of all,
We'll wonder how we ended up being typical old ladies.
And laugh about it too.
And we'll pick up our wine glasses and toast to the years that had gone pass, the people we've met, the sights we've seen.
And wondered whether the wine could taste any sweeter.