After 5 years, we finally met up and of course, our first outing together. The trip was fun. The outing was ok. The feeling was a relaxed one. However, according to Max Payne, “Your past has a way of sneaking up on you. You'll hear broken echoes of it everywhere, like a bad replay. You'll get mad at everyone for reminding you about it, even if it's all in your head”. I gotta stop meeting her up like that. Although she might not know how I feel that day, but I'm going to disclose it here.
After that night, I finally come to appreciate few of the enigmas narrated by Payne. Among them:
“The past is a puzzle, like a broken mirror. As you peice it together, your image keeps shifting. And you change with it. It could destroy you, drive you mad. It could set you free.”
“The past is a gaping hole. You try to run from it, but the more you run, the deeper it grows behind you, its edges yawning at your heels. Your only chance is to turn around and face it. But it's like looking down into the grave of your love, or kissing the mouth of a gun, a bullet trembling in its dark nest, ready to blow your head off.”
It was an insane feeling. Every piece of broken memories hit me that day. It almost killed me. I wasn’t running away from reality; far from it. Rather, I felt that I came across a crossroad: to bury my memories in peace and get on with life or to cast myself into the sea of memories, secretly indulge in my own world rather than facing the “real” one.
The truth is, seeing you really made me feel glad, while remembering the memories made me feel bad. Our friendship, like everything in life, “had started out as black and white. Somewhere down the road, the line went blurry, the colors started to run, got smudged and gray”. Tell me, dear friend, have you buried your memories of us long ago altogether, or are you suffering just as much as me by seeing me?
The question is “as old as mankind”, but tell me, “what is this feeling I’m having now?”
To be continued.
Reference:
May Payne, Max Payne 2, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde.