Dear C,
I have dreamt of you a hundred times since you left. A hundred different ways of you back home again, with us. In every one of these dreams, I’m ringing with joy — pure and uncomplicated.
I dreamt of you again, more realistic than ever. I wanted to ask why you left the convent, but was afraid asking might make you go back again. A hundred mornings of waking up to you silent and unreachable.
Are you happy? I don’t know if I want to know.
Once, our lives ran in perfect parallels. You lived two streets down from me. For six years through primary school, we were in the same class. We ended up in the same CCA, without machinations. We traded stories and sketches, what brought us together. Do you remember the endless well of games we thought up and played between everything?
We went to the same secondary school, took the same car together every morning, that 10 minutes wait standing with you by the road every weekday, without fail. We entered Drama together, took Japanese third language together.
We performed together, whenever we could. From Fungly-Mungly to Godot to CAP. I never found another person who can replicate the chemistry we had onstage.
C, you were the person I spent the most time with, from 7 to 16.
Even when we entered Uni, our lives taking different routes, relationships, and friends, we always found our way back to each other. The same Uni, your dorm a block away from mine. Taking Japanese Studies together. Remember the night we scaled the rooftop with G and D? Remember how G fell straight through a hole? “I hoard these moments in words online for us.”
For years, all the years that matter, you were by my side.
Now you are somewhere, doing something I have no way of knowing, maybe speaking another language. You have dedicated yourself to God, perhaps more and more so every year. And I have over the years gone from believing in the same God you do, to believing in a god not of our conception, to believing that maybe there are higher forces beyond our comprehension; to that there is nothing but the physical plane, evolution, and energy. That there is not only no god, but nothing after death. We are organic beings that cease consciousness and return to the earth. Once you stop fearing death, or what comes after, you stop needing a god.
Somewhere out there you are praying for my sins, praying that I too can join you in the paradise of your beliefs.
This is where we diverge: you sacrificed some of our time together on earth to have eternity together. I want nothing after death, and a bit more time with you on my transient, insignificant, and beautiful whisper of a life on earth.
Love,
your best friend Q
Q 