Sunday, May 21, 2006
[this is a letter dedicated to o6s14 by xinxue. her letter is with me so i shall type the content of the letter out here for the convenience of the rest =) haha. thankx xinxue!!]
Dear all,
I shall begin this letter with the obligatory inquiries as to your general health. i hope that everyone has been well? No fatigue-induced fainting, nervous breakdowns, excessive-workload-provoked-wrath-catalyzed display of homicidal tendencies, or flu? f that is the case, then i offer you my heartiest congratulations on surviving your second term of the customized instrument of torture skillfully disguised as 'school', a spectacular feat that i can only dream of emulating.
At this point, I feel it necessary to clarify a few points:
1. i do realise that this letter is utterly redundant, considering that i will probably be meeting everyone shortly (slightly less that 9 hours, actually, if i succeed in locating you without accidentally trapping myself in a broom closet). however, i maintain that i do not write this in vain, as i
wanted to play with nice japanese writing paper wish to create some evidence of my once-existance in this class, and by extension, the school.
2. there is no particular point or purpose to this letter. i am tragically inexperienced as a letter writer, and it shows. to any literature students, truly knowing or self-proclaimed, feel free to whip out your toolkit and search for semblances of structure or underlying meanings. i wish you luck because you'll find none. this is, simply, a hopeless case of nonsensical babbling of the more prolix variety, the by-product of a sleep-deprived mind.
3. when i first arranged myself before my desk with the intention of penning a letter to you all, i had not a single clue what would result from this terrible whim, a notion brought forth by a most peculiar bout of nostalgia-inspired thoughtfulness, crashing its way through my consciousness by sheer force of memory. sadly, even now i remain oblivous. as i am writing, coherency is abandoning me, slinking away in that quiet sly manner befitting of so fickle a servant, to be replaced by the unintelligible and inarticulate, ambiguous fog of half-formed thoughts that obscures any meaning i might have hoped to convey. in some ways, though, this may be for the best
i am certain that any of you who thought to ask about my life will, inevitably, receive an emotional and passionate rant on the bottomless pit called HC. you might also hear variations of it being a sorry excuse for an educational facility. (i can now, after three months of attempts at optimisn and re-analyzing of viewpoints, safely to say that HC is a failure as a school. it redefines the meaning of indifference, what with administrative inefficiencies, near absence of discipline, and a general lack of 'people who bothers'. they throw us into the deep end and leave us to flouder. perhaps my view is biased and limited, but i have been offered no arguments for the contradictory).
Life has been hectic in a 'i cannot believe i'm going though this' sort of way, what with dealing with the onslaught of work work work and a formerly-thought-to-be-sensible friend caught between stalking pretty boys and having a torrid love affair with KI (i do mean the subject, with all the frightening implications). As such, i can only express my regret that i had not been able to maintain a correspondence with you.
That, however, is quite enough on the topic, as this letter is not about HC, nor me, at least not specifically.
As i write, it occurred to me that my conposing this lenghty letter (budding essay that have all the potential to morph into a full-blown academic(?) paper) may be due to some urge on the subconscious level to put across the feelings that i would have never been able to express verbally, by a total inability for eloquence of speech on my part.
I have missed you, all of you, terribly. As an entity, and as individuals. it is uncharacteristically direct and expressive of me to state this, but that does not render it any less truthful. many of you i did not often exchange words with, but even through my cacophonous silence i could feel the essence of your characters seep in, become something meaningful by mere presence alone. it's that atmosphere, all your sweetness and brilliance merging to form a unique taste in the air, a faint lingering warmth, and a tug at the corner of my lips.
it's a feeling i have tried and failed to replicate, for though happiness comes it holds a different face, and after all my contemplation i can only conclude that it is not only familiarity i yearn for, but what beckons me is that tingling of the bonds formed in that painfully short three months which stretches out like decades, the strings that are my last connection to the time i went through as if in a daze.
i am not one for words when it comes to important things (what are words but limits we put on ourself and the world?), always believed that some things are better-off undefined, indulged in the deliberately vague and intangible. However, one thing is certain, and it is that even should communications fail, faces fade, and letters get buried under the unmerciful torrents of everyday trivialities to, like everything eventually do, succumb to the never-stopping flow of time and wrinkle and fade, at the end of all things, there will always be memory. and you, i will remember. does this ring of finality?
will our lives once again converge? i do not know, but i wish you to understand that it is with utter sincerity that i am spelling out this missive.
For allowing me your acquaintances, i thank you.
-Xin Xue
The terribly long post script to the terribly long letter:
Having revisted that monstrosity of a letter, i can only say that i should never again attempt writing in the middle of the night again.
i was aiming for cheerfulness. it decided that it wanted to be some sort of 'xu qing shi'. but maybe that's not too bad.
this is to convince both you and myself that i can sound halfway normal. (the clarity of wakefulness seem to be of great help)
thus, i officially end this letter.
(this postscript seem to ruin the nice dramatic mood, though, doesn't it?)
2:02 PM: yanqin*~
