Metamorphosis

June 6th 2010, 11:50 p.m. malaysian time.

I would just like to remember the exact time I write this, because I might be as labile as a rollercoaster ride for the next few weeks.

It would be just short of two months left for me within my undergraduate study. (And I am not jinxing it. No No No!! I want to graduateeeeee) But anyhoo, yes. I don't know how time passes so fast.

It's weird, though. When I was in my third or fourth semester, time feels like moving in a snail pace. Every late-nights to finish assignments, every laugh and dare I do with my good friends, every controversy that seems like such a huge thing at the time... It was so packed with things that a night feels like it is worth memories for a whole year. It's pretty hard to explain it.. It's like, everything moves so fast and changes so much that time feels like moving slower...... Get it? No? Sigh.

But that doesn't matter. The point is, when you get into the (possible) end of a phase (please please let me graduateeee!), everything suddenly moves slower, and time moves faster. For me, I have never really hung out around campus that much.. But as this might be my last semester, I suddenly find myself hanging around campus a lot. I make good friends with people I am always just friends with, and campus suddenly seems so nostalgic. It's as if all the orange colors of the building, and the Bubble teas, and the dimly lit lecture halls, have those sephia effects that you find in a photo-editing softwares. The Campus suddenly looks so nice, and I found myself missing it already.. because time moves so fast when the changes were so good.

Well, I shall not be nostalgic now. I mean, I haven't got through my exam period yet! (not jinxing it.. not jinxing it..)
But this got me thinking about how we live like a butterfly.

..wait. HAHAHAHA that sounds so lame.

What I mean is, we live through phases. All the time. I think my first phase is when I lived in Batam, my early childhood that I forget easily (and regretfully). And then I move to another phase: the religious building of Islamic Village, where I spent my grade school until I finished Junior High. It was the time I found the foundation of my life. And the the next phase is my High School, a very private space that is glamorous and tragic at the same time. It was the best days of my life. And I am at the last steps of my fourth phase, where I move into a strangely unfamiliar but familiar land.. when I first live by myself.

What I can still remember quite clearly is the time I leave my third phase, the High School period. I felt like I was invincible. I felt like I would be able to take whatever life's given me, and I would stand my ground. Me and my High School best friends.. we always know what we want. We are a group of people that mature quite early. However, now that I am finishing my current phase.. Oh my. I feel like Rose in Titanic.. like I have to hold on for dear life, but the water's been pulling me down so hard and it is so cold (because she's in, like.. what? Atlantic or something?). I lose every foundation I so carefully built, and it was so hard to hold on to that one piece of wood and not just let me be drowned, and leave it be.

The point is, as phases come and go, your sense of self is also being reconstructed constantly. As natural as it may seem, think about it. You are not yourself five years ago.. Probably not even a bit. Knowledge and interaction have a way to make you think that kindness is naive, justice is a myth, and belief is a perception. As hard as you want to hold on to your past self/selves, it will go away. And you just have to keep working, and working, and constantly working to build a better self.
Then again, something that is 'better' is just one point of view of a mysterious end.

In University, I study a lot of philosophies. My lecturers are so open about the world that nothing is right, nothing is wrong. And that's the only way to see the world, I think.

Sometimes, I think worms are so lucky. They just sleep for a bit and change into a butterfly. It seems so easy.
But after that, I think again. Butterflies will fly free.. and with that freedom, it might end being eaten by a bigger being or sprayed by gardening poison.

It really is funny how everything works out if you think about it. Time goes on, it doesn't care about anything else but the fact that it keeps on ticking. But then life changes.. phases comes and go and comes and go and etcetera etcetera. And, the only thing that you can count on is yourself. But your sense of self is an abstract thing. So where do we begin, and where do we end?

I can only find one solution to these madness: stories are told, and it would never ever end. So make stories, memories and little funny anecdotes.. That is how you make sense of all these overlapping metamorphosis around.

Good luck! :)