Happy Chinese New Year, belated
The weekend reunion was like dispossession, the years sloughed off like a second skin under which there was the same light pink familiarity - have I really known them all for a decade now? We converged en masse, effortlessly, like some cosmic hand had lifted our lexicon of friendship from Malaysia, borne it over space and time, and deposited it gently in this one house in England, slightly worse for the wear, but nonetheless intact. But if the way a spider's web survives a storm is how our group's friendship has survived time, then - only honesty henceforth - I'm one of the outlying strands, buffeted by insistent currents sweeping in some other direction.
So many friendships disperse ultimately, under a steady onslaught of mitigating factors. Geography, employment, romantic commitments, new prospects, the beckoning of different lives. How many avowedly "forever" friendships have dissolved into that mutual drift, drifted into severance? We all - perhaps even without exception - have friends we have every intention of keeping contact with, had friends we had every intention of keeping contact with. Maybe there's something in me that has come to dread this dissolution, that impels a kind of preemptive apathy. Or perhaps I've just never had a sense of continuity, or of connection.
But the easy candour to our interaction was beautiful, even if every time these reunions take place I feel more loss than reinforcement. They are wonderful, wonderful people. In the face of uncertain futures, what is one to do but savour the present and smile fondly at the past: to bask in the rare comfort of camaraderie, consume too much festive food, play too many drinking games and engage in phenomenal levels of karaoke singing.