Since I started my confinement this has happened three or four times already, where I spend the night bloghopping or playing Sudoku online till the wee hours of the morning. In fact throughout the past week my earliest bedtime must've been 2 a.m. I don't know what keeps me awake - I think it's the heat. Somehow the days feel cooler. Maybe because at night the windows are closed to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and the room gets all stuffy. The jamu and heaty confinement diet must be really working this time round - I don't even use a blanket anymore.
Of course, I make up for the sleep during the day. Usually, after breakfast and barut perut, I'll breastfeed Aiesyah while lying down and that'll get me to slumberland in no time, all the way to lunch.
Last night and tonight I managed to go through all the blogs listed on Sentraal Station. And for some reason I felt the urge to find out what's happened to someone I knew from a long time ago, so I googled the name. I think it was something my husband said on his post about Allahyarham Shahrol. Something about maintaining Silaturrahim (close ties). Which I have to admit is something I'm not good at.
When I was in my first year at university, someone from my accommodation hall stated this observation about me: "You're a drifter. You don't have a specific group of friends you're particularly close to, but you move around."
I don't know whether he meant it in a positive or negative light, or whether it was just a statement of a fact, like 'the sun is round'. I remember thinking what made him say that, but I guess it must be true. I had different 'best friends' at different stages of my life. Throughout most of primary school, I had a close group of friends from the same class, then moved on to a new best friend in Standard 6. At the beginning of Form One, in the two weeks I spent at SMDU before I left for boarding school, I became close friends with another girl with whom I shared an avid interest in Acis of Gersang. I have not been in touch with them for a large number of years already.
And then in boarding school I made new friends, and as I moved through the different classes, dorms, debating teams and so on, so the number and personage of 'close friends' varied.
After leaving boarding school, I drifted apart from some of those cliques, and formed deeper friendships with others who were previously mere acquaintances. Studying in the UK opened up a whole new world of friendships. And now, as a career woman with a family of my own, I have drifted again.
I must say I never intended to stop being friends with anyone - except maybe with a couple because I was so hurt when they never replied my letters from boarding school (I was a homesick 13-year-old, okay? Over-emo at that time.) I always had the best intention to keep in touch after the parting, and I normally do keep up the correspondence for a couple of months, even sometimes up to a year, but fail miserably to sustain it. Out of sight, out of mind.
Oh yes, there are all those excuses. Work that takes me out of town, being married, etc etc etc. But that doesn't stop other people from maintaining their friendships. I think deep down I've actually created some emotional barrier that won't allow anyone to get too close for fear of being hurt. It gets lonely, though.
Would it be so difficult to pick up from where I left off? Can I still laugh at the same jokes, share the secrets, or have we become strangers amongst ourselves that we can only afford a polite greeting and the perfunctory Hari Raya SMS that is sent en masse to everyone in our address book?
Okay, I didn't actually see this post going into this direction, but since I've written it, here goes.
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