Foops and I were just discussing our weekend plans when I told him I'm thinking of going to check out a Masters talk in NUS this weekend. (I'm just exploring avenues so it's still early days). He said 'Sure, maybe I'll do it with you too'. Haha, how weird would that be - going back to school together with my boyfriend!!!

That brought me on a trip down memory lane... to our humble beginnings. Pardon me, I'm in a funky mood today.

I never realised it then but now when I think about it, I think he must have really liked/loved me. I mean, who else would - upon graduating - drive back to the grotty halls of NUS every other day? I was but a struggling undergraduate and full-time hostelite, he (being six years older) had been working for a few years already.

We couldn't have been at more different stages of our lives.

I was staying in a tiny cube of a room, living on hand-me-down furniture with only a few hundred dollars to my name on good days and come night time bed was a really small plastic mattress. We had no airconditioning in our rooms so on hot afternoons, you could find me and my girlfriends swimming at the pool or having free ice Milo (from the fabulous Milo truck) under the Central Library or squirreled in one of the air-conditioned enclaves in school copying catching up on tutorials. My carefree world revolved around orientations, $1 macaroni lunches, ICQ, secret pals, FBT shorts, noisy slippers, bazaars and my hamster Hammie. Okay, and school too.

He, well, he lived in the real world. When we met, I'd tell him about my dance practices, how my bacteria cultures were doing (for my research project), who's running for Hall President that year or what crazy stunt Hammie pulled that day.

They were the things of his past. All that he'd left behind.

In exchange, he'd tell me about the ways of the world, yell at me to get back to my books and stop the daydreaming, zip me around in his old red Nissan Sunny or buy me grown-up gifts like my beloved Elsa Peretti necklace and a Furla namecard holder when I started my work attachment.

Maybe we filled each other's gaps or something. Perhaps we completed each other. Foops told me something once when we were just getting to know each other better. He said we were at complementary ends of the twenties (then) and really, he couldn't have been more spot-on.

When I have the time, I must go dig around for pictures from that era.

Funny things memories are. How far we've come. How things have changed with time.