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I returned from a mamak session yesterday at Tanjung feeling altogether sad, contemplative, and in a mish-mash of floating thoughts I didn’t know what to think. We met our old friend Fit, who was initially standing at the mamak waiting for his friends, but then he joined us for a long talk when we asked generic things like, “What are you doing now?”.

He talked for a long time, and for once, I noticed that we were all quiet and attentive and barely interrupted his grand emotive speech that came from his heart. His mother was mentioned a few times, but he didn’t look sad about it anymore – and he was thinner than before. Whatever that he said made me feel that we’re both so very similar that it’s almost scary – our flaws, our thoughts that I wouldn’t want to admit but he did – and it’s just that we ended up leading very different lives. Even as he mentioned about the good changes that he had only just begun to make in his life, I could already see it.

He later went off to join his friends, and came back later to continue his long tale that would have been suitable as an autobiography content in a book. Despite his usual cheerful demeanour, I couldn’t help but feel as if it was all a front – that he was trying to be cheerful to lift his own spirits and the people around him, but there’s a persistent aura of melancholy clinging to him tightly. His eyes looked tired, his eyebags large and noticeable.

When he told us he had to go, he shook hands with all 8 of us (Geok Leng, Sarah, Jon, Fang Chyuan, Andy, me, Shawn, Wai Hong), deliver the usual goodbyes, and he walked away. He walked a little ahead, then looked back and waved to us again, but none of us saw him did that except me, and I waved back, and he seemed to have missed seeing it. I don’t know why, but it was an incredibly sad scene for me – he told us he was learning to live life alone now, and I felt for him.

What he told us the entire night was incredibly mature and rational, and something that one could only say after one has been to hell and back. I wished I had said something encouraging back then, but I was at loss for words – all of us were. But I was a little glad too that he managed to find himself, that in this bleak world where everything seems to be heading towards its own doomsday, he is now the lone, mature wolf that I was trying to be.