Saturday, April 23, 2005 // 10:22 PM

and im sad. im sad when i look over the fence at lkh, at what used to be my kindergarten, what used to be my church. for awana, at least. im sad at how i never got to look at it, walk through it and run my hands over its walls, for one last time. oh it has been down a long time i know, but. but this is different, this is the face-to-face realisation of how an old and familiar way of being is dying, not dying, actively being torn down. i can see what will come to be, i have a vision of walls colour coordinated and synthetic. it is the realisation of a heap of rubble and strange and dark skinned men in yellow helmets tramping all over things, it is the realisation of the huge gaping hole where the setting for my childhood once stood. in the comic book, snoopy yells "you're parking on my memories!" i think of what i have lost and it is myself, some basic thing that was part of me a long time ago, before i screwed myself up, before i fell from innocence, in a sense, i miss that, i miss that innocence. what i wouldnt give for a throwback to glorious and unabashed naivete, a seven year old me. and. and watching children climb over the fence of the now defunct community centre makes me realise that i'd ceased to have a childhood once i moved out of gardens. now i think, it's certainly a bitter price to pay, for quarelling with michelle over our room. it seems so trivial now, hey ma we could have lived through that. even if you had wanted us to have everything in the world that you didnt, i just. i just miss it, i miss living in serangoon gardens, i could have been so different, right now. maybe. i would think... i'm a lot more dysfunctional because of that one step, oh sure no more dysfunctional than your typical postmodern suburban brat. the community centre, i used to have freaking art and craft lessons there. i remember drawing very rotound fish. i wish i had been alone there today, i would have wandered in and lost myself in nostalgia, some part deep inside me remembers every last thing. every last thing. and the building itself feels like it is throbbing with my every memory, it is the wan grey of a sky that it is set upon, it is the for-the-moment immutable part inside of me that clings desperately to the dull green paint of the walls and begs stay, please, stay with me. stay with me. it is my reflection that cries out for me to give up everything that i have come to be, in reality, at least for a moment, to join her on the other side. i want so much to be there again, but not as myself, as an eight year old, or a nine year old, the last year that i had to be completely a child. i realise now that it is no coincidence, all the things that i did. to myself. i understand now, you were of supreme importance, i understand now i loved living in serangoon gardens and that i am sorry, i am just feeling so very sorry for myself. i cant help it, it is the person i could have been and it is how i could have come to understand myself, heal myself, and now it is absolutely gone. absolutely gone. can you imagine, it is like the void inside that you have in a flash been made conscious of, it is the antidoe to your great ennui annihilated and tossed into a foreign and uncaring wind. i dont want to move on, i dont want to move on with my life. i want to go back to that and have the childhood that i never had.