Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Genusfrog [ 5:11 pm ] | 4 comments

ON OLD FRIENDS: THE YOUNG AND DYING

Today, i'm overwhelmed by an incredible feeling of sadness.

i went back to muar for a wedding dinner this weekend. by and large, i had fun meeting old classmates, exchanging stories and seeing one of my closest friends from school get married. but somewhere between joyous exclamations and saving numbers i may never use, something a lot more insiduous was going on.

i heard about a primary school friend who became a bit of a local singing sensation. apparently, growing up was good for him and he turned out good looking. so he also had a modelling career going for him. some years ago, he crashed his car somewhere outside town and died.

this reminded us of another primary school friend who died in our teens. that night, i found out that he overdosed. my friends said he'd been on drugs since standard six.

there was another guy who got into tons of debt, and loansharks, among others, wanted him dead. his girlfriend left him and his family kicked him out. he told a friend that he wanted to kill himself. the next worse fate eventually befell him and he went mad. they say he started talking to walls. he got committed to an asylum of sorts for a year, and supposedly came out improved. but as soon as he gets better, everybody wants him dead again.

this guy - his grandma used to bring him lunch every day to school. she really doted on him there. i even remember a teacher teasing him for it. this same teacher is now overweight, retired and doing odd jobs to pass the time.

not every story is tragic - some are almost parodic. one friend, best known in our days as a real jerk, ended up with two wives. they all live together and somehow have to get along. apparently, there was a double childbirth thing going on. the first wife bore a daughter, the second bore a son. i don't know whether to laugh or cry.

one of our close high school friends appears to have the success story of the night. he's now in singapore, making a five digit salary. well done, i guess. except that he works for a whiskey company, and that comes on the back of successive employs by tobacco and alcohol giants. today, the success story of my school is a very wealthy chain smoker and almost-certain heavy drinker. so i ask you - what is your marker when you measure something like success?

it turns out, i'd be sad not just for all these folks who weren't there, but also for one right by me. a very old, very dear friend, for lack of a better word, looks every bit like an alcoholic. i think he's always felt like he needed to prove himself, and i think to him, being accepted by a group means a lot. i've always sensed that about him.

cut to ten years later - the boy becomes a man and he discovers that he has an enormous threshold for holding liquor. so i guess it shouldn't have surprised me that he spent large portions of the night taking on drinking challenges, impressing tons of guys and being carted along for the toasts. he finds his acceptence. and i guess he gets their respect. but for what? so he can die young?

we were all held together at some point in school. and that same institution, which is supposed to shape us all commonly, eventually spits us all out into lives that couldn't be more different. some of us are dead. some are mental. others are roaring down the highway to untimely deaths. some of these people hold big jobs. but really, what's it all for?

you.

twentysomething.

are you fast tracking your life so that people can say you're a success? they don't take scores at thirty. they only start counting the day you die.

Labels: death, friendship, survival