Moving On.

Hey Fellas!

I’ve moved:

http://themattecomplexion.wordpress.com

=)

 

God Put a Smile Upon my Face

It’s down to just 5 more weeks before I close yet another chapter of my life, opening up to one that’s brimming and bursting with possibilities; I’m already dying to dive into this tantalizing unknown that comes after. This length of 1 year and 9mths seem to pass surprisingly, delightfuly fast (only to slow down 10times once it hit the one-more-month mark). As my friend Jake would put it: Now that O has found R, all they need is to find D to feel whole and complete. I’m actually finding the thought of receiving my pink IC after this two years quite exhilarating (yes, you could go ahead and laugh and tell me how few cycles you might have left till ROD but it really doesn’t matter, and you know that I’m right and it’s true). It’s a funny sorta feeling. Life would begin again. Wooooooo

Anyway, today we had our children’s day celebration! Thankfully our Ultimate Water Challenge turned out really well and I’m glad the kids really enjoyed themselves. Also, special thanks to Sarah, Jaz and Jevon for really making my day =) (notice its a really sarcastic smile? haha) FOR making my day really WET and CLAMMY and COLD in the air-conditioned hall. I should’ve been more careful. And I celebrated too quickly… I thought: “Phew, it’s over” ALL TOO SOON. But really, my special thanks to every CC teacher, we’re quite something actually; it is simply draining to take on these kids every Sunday morning, teaching, exciting, inspiring AND scolding them. =) All the more we need God.

And we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us!

Just 1 more month I have to brave. COME’MON.

Eulogy

I suppose it should be quite ridiculous for me to feel this way.

How could a mere boy comprehend such realities, some might say.

But I regret, in retrospect, that I could not come to fully appreciate and love.

That I did not learn to treasure nor cherish,

Everything that I held so dear to my young and foolish heart.

I can only wish, and live to wish shall I,

that I would remember something more than just your face.

Once I got 11B ahh, now I’m getting my Pink IC AHH!

Actually, it’s sang backwards (refers to title). One of the many songs we’d shout out during our route marches to keep up the spirit. =)

Discounting today, I’m exactly, 83 days – 44 working days away from the big day. Not meaning to brag of course (since everyone will eventually reach this stage at some point and it’s just meaningless to tease… though it does feel awesome i might add), but just to reiterate the fact how everything in life seems so fast-forwarded in retrospect; 1 year 10 months, it honestly has not been such a drag thus far and I hope my remaining days wouldn’t be bogged down by some meaninglessly ridiculous training that some bright officer would happen to think-up just to show how committed and brilliantly smart he actually is. Of course, no one in specific. Which is always the case.

In fact, I am actually grateful that my appeals for deferment 2 years ago did not get through. Instead of seeing it as an untimely and rude interruption to my academic advancement, it is most definitely God’s good planning. Had I not entered our Good and Valiant Service, I would definitely be working at some pie shop as a waiter right now, holding on to a degree in Business Administration that is as good and worthy as toilet paper. I exaggerate. But anyone would agree that this isn’t exactly a very auspicious time to graduate… unless, without doubt, you are the one giving the valediction. Which I find hard to imagine in my case.

Army has played it’s part in shaping me up, teaching me life’s lessons and invaluable social skills. Such as? Well, for starters, most people have a general inclination to be selfish, not everyone deserves especial acts of kindness and everybody works only for book-outs. But I shall delve into that discussion another time.

With my time coming to an end in this green chapter, I should be all psyched and hyped up, crossing out my remaining days in the calendar with great diligence, dreaming of all the freedom I could get and fantasizing about the fact that I get to drool on my own pillow every single night (figuratively of course), but I am and, I’m not. What I mean to say is that life starts after this and everything will come and go and pass us like the morning mists that drape and hang at our feet – fleeting and surreal. Life isn’t meaningless, it’s just short. Or rather, “youth is short” should be the right way to put it. It is mixed excitement and fear that hits me every time I think ORD.

Perhaps I worry too much. Which is only natural and human because we’re always thinking ahead, thinking “What if”.

So if you’re wondering how I feel about ORD. Here is your most definite and precise answer. But in God I trust, I trust God alone!

The Revelation

A continuation from The Time Traveler..

He prayed prostrate before the great altar, until he could say no more, until he could bear no longer the agony of bringing to mind the past that he so very much would have hoped for. He laid there unmoving. Too consumed by a pain he could not comprehend; it was a shattering of the spirit – a pain that one should never hope to discover. Fatigue beset his sunken frame as the evening began to draw its curtains and the colours of the fleeting earth faded into a deep ochre sepia tone, throwing long shadows across the inner chamber where he lay.

He was no longer thinking. His eyes were an empty room and his heart was beginning to grow cold. Numb. He picked himself up, struggled and stumbled as his blood started to circulate again, bringing life into his lifeless body. He stood upright before her photograph again, forlorn. God would not answer him. And why should He even? This was a retribution of sorts. Hail, he who gives and takes away. No, this was reality; he had to face up to it, live with it. Death is after all an inevitable truth of life; where there is a beginning, there will be an end. With that reconciliation, he turned to leave the cavernous inner courts, his eyes on the dusty boards. There was no point being here any longer.

It was then, out of the corner of his sight, that he caught a silhouette in the half-light of a familiar frame watching him from the back of the rows of benches. Apparently not everyone had left as he entered the wake. He lifted his head to catch his features but at that same moment the figure darted away to his left, down the corridor. It intrigued him, and sadness left him momentarily as he wondered who it might have been.

“Hey!” He croaked. But the footsteps that led away picked up pace upon his calling. Why would anyone run from him? Curiosity carried his legs and soon he was thundering down the wide corridors the figure had disappeared into. He could hear him; he was closing the distance steadily. He took  a right down another corridor, trailing close behind into a stairwell that spiraled down to a courtyard. He was inches away and breathing heavily, his legs were beginning to feel the entirety of his weight. The slim and tall figure of a man slightly limping was now making a break across the courtyard for the gates. He would surely lose him now. But just as he thought so, the figure threw himself upon the wooden gates only to find a dead end.

My god, what a chase. He came to a stop a few feet away from the slender and suspiciously familiar mystery man, and readied himself in case he were to escape yet again.

“Who the heck are you really? What’s there to run from?” Gibbans was heaving, both hands on his knees, drenched in perspiration. But the man did not flinch, his back towards Gibbans.

“You think this is funny huh?” fuck he thought. Gibbans wasn’t exactly a very slim man. Over the years, his exquisite taste for heavenly delicacies and over indulgence was really putting a toll on him now.

“Turn around for pete’s sake and let’s see that face of yours!”

Already the new moon was coming out, revealing itself as the mantel of night drabs itself around the tender evening light. Hesitantly, yet slowly, the man turned to reveal himself – legs, body and finally face. It took him a moment to realize, for he was perhaps uncertain of what his eyes were telling him, but he did and it struck him as an impossibility. He gasped and stumbled back at such a revelation. It was illogical. He was dreaming or hallucinating. His eyes bore open wide in horror and amazement. For there in the pale moonlight, in plain truth, he could not deny that he was staring at himself, Gibbans only 10 years younger.

The Time Traveler

It marches on, in firm and solid tandem, cruel and relentless – crushing anything and everything that were to be so bold or incredibly daft as to get in its way. And it does not stop. It did not stop for the boy whose world seemed to have crumbled when his heart was broken; It did not stop for the overly studious bookworm who, at the finality of all that he had slogged and slaved for came to realize that it was a greater test that he had failed; Likewise, it was the same for the dreamer who, believed that his world of dreams was in fact a reality; It would not  pause a second for the father who cries in silence every night in deep regret, in a discrete corner of the home for the aging. Less of all will it turn back for anyone who had wasted their live in fruitless pursuits and pathetic chases.

It is void of any emotion; there is no pleading when it comes and goes. For it comes and it goes, both in that  same moment without warning, as a thief would and it will eventually take away everything that you hold dear. Like life, for a good instance. Its onslaught is something eventual – as is everything. And the only question left for one to answer would be When and How. This is what the harsh realities of life have taught him. Time, once lost, is lost for eternity. An old adage that often falls deaf on those have never heard of death. But experience never fails as a teacher (for after that, there is only a poor, hopeless student), it only comes a little too late.

Sorrow stabbed him like a knife through the heart as he walked up before the tinder box that encased his mother, trembling, pale as a ghost. It is the year 1998, September the 10^th, exactly 10 years since he’d last seen her. Guilt, regret, frustration surged through him welling up in his stricken eyes as his hands and knees tremor with a weakness that was washing over and overwhelming him. He could not bring himself to look into her eyes. They were eyes that held a peaceful and warming countenance – yet eyes that held in it a tragic story of pain, loneliness and suffering. His knees gave way and he crumbled before the pedestal throwing out a  long and dreadful choking wail that reverberated throughout the recesses of the church, flooding it with his grief. He pressed his eyes together, wincing in austere pain and bowed in silent sob, face buried in those guilty hands. And he prayed, for the first time in ten years, he prayed. If only God would reverse the hands of time for anyone.

Oh, on a Saturday night…

I decided to do away with my morbid little passage of the man who lost his sense of touch – in other words, who was numb and impervious to any sensation on his skin (pain for that matter). I guess it was too sick for my liking. Although, I still feel that it was a good thought. Imagine, one day you realize that you can’t feel pain or anything. (Maybe I’d chop off my pinkie and down PES straight away….  just kiddin. haha.) That’s gotta be pee-in-the-pants scary. Anyways, I’m not dark or anything in the head, so don’t worry.

Today we had the NE show 2 – everything went well; the fireworks were beautiful as usual and nearly all the so-called stars came e.g. electrico and a couple of other musicians so that saved the P5’s the disappointment of seeing  a stand-in saf personnel holding a tag board that says “so and so” walk onto the stage. You know, I’ve been listening to NDP songs for nearly a month now, twice a week, the only songs stuck in my head most of the time would be electrico’s “What do you see” and some malay tune that goes “selamat datang… ke Singapura” or however it’s supposed to be. Makes you wish you could mute the volume in your head. An indoctrination I’d say…

I LOVE SINGAPORE!!!!!!

see what I mean?

But it’s all good in the end. There isn’t really much on my hands and I get to mingle with performers and such (perhaps a couple of prettier ones) which makes it all the more interesting. The worst thing about NDP… and I mean really really sickening thing about the rehearsals would be… the FOOD. It’s been Pizza Hut for nearly 8 times, KFC about 4 times and SFI, thrice. Unhealthy, unhealthy, bored of the same ole meal. Gives me the shivers.

Have I told you what I like about this years NDP?

Lookout for the SAF fighting capabilities display, a music chronology mass dance and yes, the fireworks. =) I totally need a camera.

And, I totally want a new guitar. I believe that one needs an instrument that purrs to excel. Tell, me that’s bullshit.

Oh and 53A, caught them at the esplanade right after NDP, they give good vibes. =)  check them out.

Good night!

God never fails

And the NE show 1 concluded concluded on a really wet note, leaving everyone drenched to the bone in shivers. The rain came with everything it had, spreading across the platform from one end to the other ever so languidly it seemed like only half the platform was pouring whilst the other would stay dry. The rain came right at the end as we stood at attention to the national song that sang throughout the darkened sky while fireworks lit up the night. The rain came and I smiled.

For God kept His promise; the rain had threatened us since early in the evening; thunderclouds that seemed bent on spoiling the show.  But I prayed and great weather prevailed… And I guess God seems to be reminding me to be strong in my faith and walk with Him – to keep my eyes on him as I tread the choppy seas. Trust in me – He must’ve been hinting, Do you doubt my might? – He read my mind. And He demonstrated it.

I’ve been rather sully and dull lately, which is all July’s fault and the anticipation of things to come in the latter part of my remaining days months in the service. I suppose that was God’s way of consolation and encouragement. Reminding me that I’m never gonna be walking alone in all of this nonsensical stuff I’d be doing.

But that doesn’t quite explain those dark clouds over my head. I suspect, I live in the past sometimes. My mind takes me back to years before and I’m shooting down a steep gravel road on a bicycle with the wind in my face,  I’m running down the beach taking in the salt in the sea breeze, I’m just chillin with the friends who hold me up in life. But I guess its ridiculous of me to feel that way.

I suppose I’m an old man of sorts. yep.

July blues?

Remembering His deed today, there is something to be joyful about afterall. For “as surely as the Lord Lives”, there can be nothing more assuring than such.

A new beginning…

Test, test, test.

And finally after much meddling. This computer conk has gotten it to work in his favour. phew.

Hello wordpress!