Gigantic shadows

I’ve always been meaning to ask. Why does 爱 not contain 心 when 愛 has done in the past? Why does love become heartless in the process of simplifying words?

Do we love without our hearts now?

For some reason, writing 我爱你 as a birthday greeting/joke to Vick Kee recently on a birthday card felt a little odd. Not about the fact I’m proclaiming an untrue and obviously-didn’t-happen love, but the fact that writing the word 愛 itself felt quite.. foreign.

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So I stayed overnight at Bryan’s place yesterday on the pretext of studying. Since our classes ended at 4pm, we (Steffi, Ching Ching, me) followed his car back to his home in Cheras, after dropping the girls at Ching Ching’s rather grand-looking double-storey.

Had dinner at Wong Kok Char Chan Teng at Leisure Mall (some place I used to frequent as a kid) nearby which is only about 2 minutes walk away from his house, with Steffi and Ching Ching.

Soo we reached home and jengjengjeng studied Accounting and Maths in his room, like wtf omg imposshible barbie-Q. I was actually feeling sleepy for reasons I don’t know of, maybe I haven’t been opening up any books to purposely study or revise my work when exams are like next week. And the thought of doing any revision bored me to sleep.

Okay so who’s interested to listen to me rambling on about uninteresting topics like exams and studies anyway.

Lights were then off at 1am after the comprehensive acceptable amount of studies we made on a portable table in Bryan’s room. I was lying on the mattress on the floor, eyes opened up to the darkness, with Bryan lying on his stomach on his bed, a single light illuminating from his handphone like sunlight in the darkest of caves, probably SMSing away.

I stared hard at the ceiling, just thinking, just stoning. Some intangible black patterns moved across it when I came to a realisation that it was a gigantic outline of Bryan’s head, strands of hairs and all. I laughed loudly - it was just funny at that time to watch shadows roaming about in the dark even if it's only one person's - and I told him like an excited toddler to look behind him.

He whirled around and his face noted nothing and looked rather blank. “It’s your shadow,” I laughed, probably looking and sounding quite silly in retrospect.

It’s just another nostalgia of mine I suppose. Back then when I was a kid at my old and quite shabby house in Taman Pertama, Cheras, there used to be plenty of interruptions of electricity, so much so it became a norm (not that the electricity tripped every single week, but it was quite often compared to these days). And when there wasn’t any electricity, we would use thin, long, white candles to shower the surrounding with fiery lights.

And that was when gigantic shadows would creep out. Back then I’d weave dogs, butterflies, rabbits and other imaginable creatures just with my hand, seeing them frolicking on my concrete walls, and what should be the marble tiles.

I’d pass the time away with these things, or hang outside on the then extremely small compound, or try to sleep with my parents fanning me, sweat forming all over my body.

They say that memories are created and filed away deep within the masses of cells in your head, but it only takes a single, simple thing like a (gigantic) shadow to evoke it, to awaken a childhood memory deep in slumber.