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It was then when I was 7 and had just completed my first year at my primary school in KL, and news fluttered over that we were moving to Subang. Back then in 1995 when the days of long-distance communication was restricted to only the telephone (house line, mind you) and traditional letters, that was how I kept in touch with my then best friend who lived in the fireman’s quarters.

I regret to say that his name is completely buried within the entangled recesses of my mind, it doesn’t even vaguely register on my tongue now. He’s a Malay, and we just clicked. Back then such racial details were hardly important, what mattered most was how we had fun laughing and played a variant of cops-and-robbers and ice-and-water (wtf stupid name) and enjoyed one another’s company. Back then, having fun and trying to be the top 3 of the class were all that mattered.

Moving on to Standard 2 was a little tough – I was the new kid on the block and I was placed in class 2 Tanjung, which inadvertently attracted jokes of it being Tanjung Rambutan, stupid childish jokes I now realise. The first person I ever made friends with in Subang was Geok Leng, and for some reason this fact I remember quite clearly till now – after my first day in school ended with a bell ring, I walked up to her, asked for her name, and I think I did say this much as I wish it otherwise, but I asked her, “Can we be friends?” in that period of childish innocence. Shit it almost sounded like a Friendster-esque potential stalker’s private message. And I think I sat next to Wai Hong in class.

That year was also when I got to know my then neighbour Soon Guan who lived next door, who shared the same passions in videogames and was the only one I knew of who possessed a Sony PlayStation, thus begun our sleepovers during school holidays that stretched right into high school – he was a friend I truly respected, trusted, and loved, and he was so close to my family and me that we even went on holidays together.

That single photo still reside in the photo frame in my room for years till now: my arm over his shoulder, him with two fingers to form makeshift devil horns on my head, my other hand breaking into a peace sign over my younger brother’s head – we were all smiling and laughing so naturally at Cameron Highland’s tea plantation, those were the periods of innocence.

We’ve had so few arguments I think the last one we had was at that Cameron Highland’s trip immortalised in that photo itself. We used to spend countless of our parents’ ringgit on SMSes (it was RM0.20 or RM0.30 per SMS last time WTFWTF) when he and his family moved out, trying to keep in touch, trying to comfort one another, trying to preserve the bonds of our little friendship.

Come high school, we drifted apart naturally as what happened to most due to distance, time, and hormonal attacks. But even till now every now and then we still kept in touch.

I still remember Ikhwan Hakeem of 3 Cempaka who used to live at USJ 5 – a rich kid – and borrowed a few of my Doraemon comics and moved to Singapore along with my comics wtf. He used to tell me he was a Malay, but about 3 years later he ICQ-ed me (damn retro lah ICQ wtf) confessing that he’s an Indian Muslim and he was embarrassed of that fact wtf?? I still remember his nickname that we unceremoniously gave him – Hakim Pao, because of his dark skin and all.

I still remember during Standard 2 I held hands with Alicia Mun, who sorta tricked me into doing so, saying something about it being a ‘display of friendship’ and I blindly did so. I was of that age when I was naive and so innocent, and didn’t know it was an elaborate ploy from a girl who had a crush on me – can you believe what Standard 2 kids are capable of? Needless to say that drew a lot of flak from my other female classmates who later confessed they too had a crush on me wtf (I still remember these words clearly from Xin Min, “I can’t believe I had a crush on you” wtf). wtf Standard 2 only so fast got crush wtf I didn’t even know love back then.

Fast forward to Standard 4 saw me mingling around with Ridzuan and Ashyiff, where we established our then make believe company we called CARE – Clement Ashyiff Ridzuan Entertainment wtf =.= The demography of hanging out with mainly Chinese girls shifted to mainly Malay guys and girls – Nizam kecik (not the one I knew in u8), Wan Faida (same bus!), Mazafira, Zatul Itri, Suhaila..

Along came Khairi from Belgium who landed into my Standard 6 life – we clicked so fast we were the bestest of friends from the start, we visited one another’s home, and during Form 1 I’d go to his house almost every other week to catch up as we were in different schools, he in USJ 13, I in USJ 8. Our closeness abruptly stopped when I guess we finally settled into our own school cliques, and when he moved to sekolah berasrama penuh, that concluded all forms of communication except for intermittent hellos and goodbyes.

I still remember his then favourite band – O-Town. I still remembered how I persuaded him to go with me to the Westlife concert (the most expensive ticket even, RM250, and even then we still have to watch the television screens wtf), how we were so overjoyed by the experience of our first concert we hugged randomly in the middle of a sea of people, how we envied our ex-classmate Alina Abdul Halim who managed to snag the 2nd-row-from-the-front VIP seats wtf.

I still remember during Form 1, when Danus pulled the childish pull-the-chair-when-friend-was-about-to-seat, causing Shawn to land roughly on his bum and he burst into tears, and when Wai Hong asked what his favourite things were, he answered, “Breasts” wtf, and we all laughed together and all was right again.

I still remember how during Form 3 I was so close to Angela Pn Tan Lan Lan started asking me if we were an item wtf (why teachers also so pat lmao). I still remember then how it was the first time Heng Li landed in our school, and the first impression that I inaccurately form of him was that he was a Cantonese-speaking gangster who turned out to be quite the opposite.

OMFG Jessica, Chee Hee, Wai Hong, Geok Leng, Eugene Lee, May Wan, Sasi, Kean Leong, and I were classmates for 5 years straight!!

I remember how Janoah went almost stalker-ish on me.

I remember how I once told Heng after SPM that I don’t mind if Daniel didn’t come to us to Langkawi (secret is out now wtf) because I wasn’t that close with him, and how at the end of that 4 days we hung out with each other more than we did in our 5 years in the same school wtf.

So many things to remember to condense into a single entry, and now that we’re all 19 (except for Ding anyway), being in this erratic u8 clique of ours is the single longest duration of friendship I’ve ever had, in terms of closeness. Three years from now, Shawn would pursue his culinary future in other countries, and what Mrs Koh asked innocently last Monday, “Will you three [me, Andy, Shawn] still be close friends 10 years from now?” had me thinking.

And soon enough Suet would be the first among us to depart to the foreign world. Will we still keep in touch, or be torn apart slowly by the waves of time?

Maybe in the end what truly matters was that we remember each other, remember of the notoriously crazy things we did, remember the outrageously stupid things we said, and we remember, “It was then…”