ships and seas and useless thoughts.

we visited the rss persistence today, one of the singapore navy's massive tank landing ships. i don't know if i've mentioned this before, but the navy has always appealed to me. back in bmt i almost signed on - i'd already reached the interview stage before i changed my mind. later on i'd look back and think that i was mad to even consider signing on.

moving through the quiet corridors of the ship, though, reminded me of the reasons why i wanted to join the navy. as i stood within the enclosed cabin and looked out at the skies above the silent sea i felt an immense longing, a tremendous sense of promise and beauty not unlike the feeling i get from a carefully-inked drawing or the wind against my face on a sunday afternoon.

stendhal once postulated that beauty is the promise of happiness. in a way, i think found the ship beautiful because of the unfulfilled life, the possibilities of futures that i saw in the naval life i will never lead. thinking it over, i realized that two things appealed to me.

one, perhaps the more obvious one, was the prospect of change; the opportunity to dock at ports all around the world, to walk through different cities. the opportunity to sail away from the mistakes i've made, to lose myself in places where nobody knows me.

the other was the prospect of constancy, of closeness. on a ship, nothing changes. there are spaces to live, spaces to be alone and spaces to be close with the other people on board. and the whole ship is your family - men and women you can trust and grow to love, friends and companions you can have meals and travel with. this was what the small, quiet spaces and corners in the ship spoke to me of - the reason why just moving through the ship made my throat stick.

eventually, however, i came to the realization that i didn't really want, at my core, to join the navy. my longing was much more primal than that - it was the same longing, the same conflict between escape and loneliness, the conflict of wanting to be both utterly known and completely unknown, that drives people to elope, to run away, to be with the people they love and leave the places they know.

it's funny. i want to leave, but i don't want to be lonely. when i told nicole about my dreams of navy in bmt she told me that she'd thought about it too. back then i toyed briefly with the childish, wistful idea of joining the navy with her and being on a ship together. but i also knew at the same time that not only would we never share lives that close, we would only go on to drift further apart as uni and army wore on. i will never be in the same class as nicole ever again. for the rest of our lives, the little we had in common - the shared experiences, the people - will rapidly fade, until our relationship will be as improbable as it should have been to begin with.

in all honesty i don't know why i'm still writing about nicole. if she were reading this she'd probably think i'm using her as some fucked up pseudo-muse. i know. i know that she thinks i never really loved her for being her, that she was just a player in the idealist fantasy i try to impose on my life, that the reason why i'm not letting go of her is because i haven't found a replacement for that role she used to occupy in my life.

maybe that's true, i don't know. maybe she's right and i don't really need a nicole to be my girlfriend; maybe i just want any girl.

maybe so. but what i know is that even if we were shit as a couple i really do miss having a nicole in my life. being nicole, doing her stubborn technophobic sporty squealish nicole things. maybe she was right and i never really loved her. all i know is that i care, quite a lot. and sometimes i miss her so much i can't sleep and i don't know why i'm like that.

my regrets can't quite be counted on both of my hands.

bruises.

sometimes i get scared my body will grow old before i do. already it betrays me with old injuries that don't heal, fevers i can't shrug off - thailand put such a strain on my back i'm not sure it'll recover anytime soon.

as a boy you tend to think that you're invincible, that you'll recover from anything, that enough sleep and rest will heal your body of anything life can throw at it. it's hard to imagine never being able to recover, to imagine and accept that what is gone is gone. youth means that you will never die.

nicks, scratches, bruises, cuts from the blades of concertina wire digging into my arm. my body is deteriorating, being covered over with scars.

my hands are rougher now.

what is gone is gone is gone.

play.

i'm happier than this blog would indicate. i don't think about nicole as often as the frequency with which she is mentioned here would imply, either.

this is just where i come to get rid of the little wrenching moments that still grab me sometimes. today's memory is nicole gleefully prodding my PLAY shirt trying to get different reactions out of the different letters (L for Love, A for Asshole); after which i tickle her till she begs me to stop, and the two of us curl up comfortably with against each other for the rest of the afternoon.

...

last entry before thailand, probably. i'm scared to go. but at least nicole isn't there to lose anymore. i still remember her sms when i was in brunei, about there being a lot of guys in uni. her realizing something i knew all along.

in a way i always felt like gatsby; knowing that i didn't deserve the kind of love she gave me, feeling like i was cheating her somehow by being with her when there were other guys i was sure she would like better.

it's why i got so angry, i guess. because it was inevitable and i knew it was inevitable and i always knew it was inevitable but she said no, and that no denied the universe where she would go to uni and i would be in army and she would fall in love with other better guys.

the worst of it is that she wasn't lying. i think she would have stayed with me if i had managed to change. i let army defeat me, then. looking back, i was dead through the week, desperate through the weekends. all i was doing really was holding on to the one thing that still meant something to me - nicole. when what i should have been doing was waking up to what was going on and taking charge of the situation.

i'm doing that now, albeit belatedly, and not a day goes by that isn't wrenched out of my heart. every day i grow a little more, i lose a little more of her.

oh nicole. she was right to break it off. i should've stopped us first. but i didn't want to let her go.

nicole taps now on another boy's chest, and they are tender together, in that tiny artificial space i used to share with her, that space where it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other as a child.

life is elsewhere.

i hate the feeling of slipping. slipping backwards while everything else is slipping away.

real life is elsewhere. entirely elsewhere. as it has always been, as it always will be. but i won't hide behind that now; i have to find a way to live in this.

i am not my mistakes.

am i?

i don't know why i'm still writing. none of it makes sense when i read it back.