Out of the Blue

I was back in secondary school. Huang Liping was there. We were on an excursion in some neighbourhood in Singapore. Like obedient little children, we walked silently in pairs through a row of shops. I couldn’t understand why we had to be there. As we stopped to rest on the sidewalk, Huang Liping predicted that someone was going to win $100,000. The figures were as clear to my eyes as the back of my hands. It made no sense why she mentioned it to us because we were mostly a bunch of teenagers struggling with Elementary Mathematics. She laughed. Someone screamed in the distance. All heads turned in the direction the scream came from. A man was jumping among several people huddled in front of a Toto shop. He was undoubtedly happy for some reason, which we soon found out to be having won $100,000. What did that mean? I didn’t remember being happy for the man. I stared at him in the distance and then I looked at my “buddy” Huang Caiping. She was quiet looking sad. Oblivious to what was happening, her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere in a somber if not grim domain. I opened my mouth to say something. I woke up feeling my head weighed heavier. I thought I hadn’t had enough sleep because my youth had again creeped into my subconscious out of the blue.

Why had Liping been so prominent in my dream? Did my memory hang on to Christmas Eve when Caiping called me? I had been at home watching the television with my father. I looked on my cellphone and the number that appeared on the screen revealed that it was from Singapore. A female voice immediately familiar spoke. My sweet friend Caiping who deserved every happiness in the world because of someone’s absence and disloyalty. Was she talking to anyone? Was Liping helping her? Did anyone else really care to remember that another human was torn inside? Where was everyone? Where were her other friends? Have we become so absorbed with the present that we have forgotten the things that should matter most? What do Huang Liping, Huang Caiping, and $100,000 have in common? Was it worth the headache in the morning? They become more vivid now…these dreams…details of faces and places of another time. I never seem to think of the present or perhaps I do but they are never deep enough for me to remember the moment I wake up. Perhaps,  it was better that way for life’s unnecessary interruptions that would only cause undue mental and psychological challenges. In the first place, I do not think I enter the realm of dreams often because I do not think there is any reason to. The present has granted me some sense of reliability and stability to warrant a rude intrusion of a disciplined mind. I am where I am. That is all.