Nightswimming deserves a quiet night…

I miss my best friend. It has been months since we last saw each other. Text and online messages are hardly a good substitute for the person who is one of the very few people who could understand even the worst of my idiosyncrasies, tolerate my recurring depressive moods, and who shares my desire to go somewhere far, away from the maddening unwelcome demands of this so-called urban life.

Sharing a room with her back in those dorm days also meant sharing almost everything else: clothes, coffee, books, academic woes (boy, we did have a lot), conversations about the opposite sex, getting into troubles, the list could go on and on. We were the typical girlfriends, but without the irritatingly petty issues like not talking for some time because of an argument or misunderstanding. One incident we can’t get over, however, was when we once entered a store together and the guard greeted us with the requisite “Good morning ma’am, sir.” Up until now we still argue over who between the two of us was the “sir”.

We were a noisy bunch in our dorm room. The security guard had often sounded her shrill whistle up at our window because we were all over the room, shrieking and laughing uncontrollably (with one of our caffeine-saturated roommates literally rolling on the floor) when the other residents were already asleep. So much has changed since those days when we would often go out to watch music gigs and literally sleep in the streets of the campus afterwards while waiting for our dorm to open at six o'clock in the morning, when we had lived for the adrenaline rush. Life requires one to grow up. We knew that we would have to leave our obsession with those rock stars, and the escapades that followed, behind and move on to the real world where the adrenaline rush often last longer than one night, being responsible is not just looking out for each other while on the streets at 4am, and there are a lot more bastards than an entire concert arena could contain.

These days, we are both busy getting our heads in its right working order (what “right’ really means, we’ll never be sure), like two cars at a garage getting their busted aircon fixed or having an entire new coat of paint as if changing colors could guarantee a smoother ride even on rough pavements.

"I demand euphoria!” it says in her Friendster shout-out. Oh, we do, Janneth, we do.