said King Lear

so we'll live
and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies

Yesterday, a bunch of us gathered at C's house to celebrate her birthday. I couldn't recognise S. But when he started speaking, I practically screamed, "S!" Some people we recognise not by how they look like, but how they speak. I like that. I wonder if people recognise me by my hand actions or as another S once described, "mini forcefields". Later, in the night, after the security guard reminded us to keep our voices low, we were all very quiet as S told us his love story. Full of the freshness that only relationships that just started can have - the uncertainty of it all, the reinterpretation of all the past events to figure out when the thread of love started or even how it will unravel at all - will we last? Oh, please do. That sense of shared urgency and hope. His story went straight through my heart.

Another moment that made me smile was when He looked with amazement at Carrot (too many friends to initial as C) after she explained her thesis for her postgraduate studies. He said, "None of my friends are as cool. Some engineers, some bankers...." I laughed.

Oh, the un-coolness of how I have turned out. There was enough of the old, enough of the familiar, to see and remember our much younger selves running and laughing along C's house. As we started to pack up (because some of us had work the next day), our feet became completely wet. A group of very young teenagers started diving rapidly into the pool. Loud splash after loud splash. Someone said you had to be very young to do that.

And so we left, tupperwares and half-finished cakes, our feet soaked, our stories still unravelling.