Life is mostly froth and bubble, but two things stand like stone, kindness in another’s trouble and courage in your own. Klaz Of 78 was to be our time tunnel. Our secret chamber to integrate among men and mice of yesterday, with an objective of bridging a more cohesive ‘today’ between them. I think Ziehan and I were there more for our better tomorrow. We were inducted into this ‘committee’ to help put to plan a grand initiative to re-unite the old folks of YISS ’78. By the power vested in us, this ‘committee’ proposes and disposes at wills. Because this noble idea of a reunion was first mooted by certain individuals, the leaderships of this ‘committee’ were assumed by its ‘Founding Father’ and his ‘Mother Nature.’ Being just an ordinary member of the common people, my convention was solely Ziehan. In this ‘committee’, the greater public has no voice in regard to the appointment of its member into their mini parliament. Neither ‘AY’ nor ‘NAY’… the discretion to select the committee’s ‘committee’ was more often decided by few on a Tête-À-Tête basis. Whatever happens to ‘Consensus Ad Idem’?

It first started as an idea. Then there was this objective. Then came the grand plan. Then all the excitement. Then there were hopes…NOW there’s nothing. When Columbus started out he didn’t know where he was going; when he got there he didn’t know where he was; and when he got back he didn’t know where he had been. By this metaphoric comparison, there might have been a similarity between that of Klaz and its ‘committee’, and Columbus and his crews. Lest we forget, history acclaimed him as the first man to have discovered that the earth is round. Twenty-seven years after we all left school, Klaz discovered that the world is rounder. The ‘committee’ bred many birds of the same feather; and other than flocking together, they flew round and around in small circle.

For every meeting Klaz convened, it was always for a very good reason. Of course that reason became better than good for Ziehan and I. Moment by moment, it was a prelude that attached a secret recipe between us. It was to be our playground where we flirted each other with fortuitous glances and naughty text messages. A dangerous liaison indeed to the conservatives, but if democracy has a better meaning in its literal sense, then we were both falling in love by our very own vote of confidence. They are all ill discoverers that they think there is no land, when they see nothing but sea.

The love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay. Love isn’t love until you give it away. Oscar Wilde once wrote, “They do not sin at all who sin for love.” I have said to her more than once before that if loving her is wrong, then I never want to be right. The very philosophy of love and life that she too embraces with fortified resolve. It was at West Coast By The Park that she professed her love with such courage and conviction. We both knew then that our journey of a thousand miles had just begun with our first step; a day at a time. From our forgotten past to our most recent yesterdays, we packed it along with us lock, stock and barrel; and we did not leave anything behind. For yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow is only a vision, but today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Ziehan has been monumental in my life, a shrine above all. If I can manifest my love for her beyond more than words can say, I will give her an ‘erection’ bigger than Taj Mahal. The relationship still endures snide opinion from them whose lives might have taken some beatings themselves. When it’s easier to just live and let live, the opinionated few can’t live with the fact, and made our business theirs to patronize. Have they not lived in an atmosphere that was so polluted by haze, created by fires that they didn’t even start? I believe that most of you did at one point in time of your life or another. But because health was not a matter of that critical importance to you, it wasn’t good enough a reason to drop and die.

I’m not so sure now if it was Einstein or me who formulated the theory in relation to the relativity of time and those idiots behind it.

If A equals success, then the formula is A=X+Y+Z+U, where X is “work,” Y is “play,” and Z is “mine,” then U just “keep your mouth shut.”


To Be Continued….