Chapter 7

I went back to school earlier today to collect my A level certificate. Kind of early, I guess, judging from the empty nominal roll, but it hardly matters.

I thought of visiting several tutors. For all my passivity in and outside class I’ve developed an indescribable attachment toward them. Maybe it’s because they had provided guidance for me in one way or the other: what I should do in the future, why it doesn’t matter that life doesn’t matter, the importance of being earnest, why and how I should be more optimistic, how to chase girls, other important stuff which have or would surely contribute to my personal well-being in the years to come. I miss those consultation sessions, and I would have visited those tutors if a sentence hadn’t struck me at the precise moment I was deliberating what to do after I had the cert in my hands. “Kenneth Chong, you’re leaving as quietly as you came?” That was said to me by my secondary 4 history tutor, after I had my O-level cert in my hands, and I recall having it said to me again, with some syntactical variation, by a classmate when…I forgot. So I thought, hey yea, since when did Kenneth Chong leave things with a farewell and goodbye?

I wonder how Mrs Ho’s doing. I wonder if my tutors would remember me years down the road, because, prominent as they are in some of our lives, they’d probably had and would take many more batches of students under their influence. On a large scale, we’d all look the same.

As I headed for the main gate (as quietly as possible) I noticed, for perhaps the last time, how beautiful the front driveway of the school as well as the adjacent neighborhood outside it is. There are plants and it’s quiet. I miss those times I’d travel down the driveway, sometimes with a friend or two but mostly alone, to have a quiet lunch outside the school’s premises, at the coffeeshops in the neighbourhood. I never did understand why people liked eating in the canteen so much when it was so dark and noisy. I never did understand the people there, but that’s beside the topic. The topic is the beauty of the driveway and the adjacent neighbourhood and how I like walking out the school alone.

There are many gaps which should be filled. There are many memories I can use to fill them. There are many shades of color I can pick out and paint, many words I can string together in an effort to represent the threads of the life I led in the past 2 years, but not so now because Im closing the chapter. It had, in a sense, never been opened, and if it had, never well-written.