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.