A week ago while I was at a friend’s place, I was presented with letters I’ve written from my younger days. Things that I’ve written on a whim, happy birthday and christmas cards with lengthy messages (cause as you can tell I am rather longwinded), was suddenly presented to me in a box. Not all the letters belonged to me, but I was presented with those that bore my handwriting (which is pretty recognizable to a certain extent) and I (not drunk enough) had to deal with this crazy emotions of being embarrassed by all the random, ridiculous and nonsensical things that a younger version of myself wrote. It was crazily humiliating cause I was that cheesy, that innocent and random. I still remember the one that I mailed to Norway, which had this liner “I hope you bring this letter back home.” and my friend was like.. ‘there you go.’
To be honest, it was heartening to see that my handwritten letters were not thrown away. Every handwritten letter kind of.. take time you know and it contains a tiny bit of history/moment happening during that period. I’m the type of person that maximises every single space on the piece of paper, instead of being short and concise. I couldn’t deal with the fact that ‘younger me’ wrote like that, so I didn’t actually take a good read and all letters. I just skimmed through the content to figure out the dates and I think it was from 2005 to 2015; 2015 was the last one. We spent a couple more moments to figure out what happened since then and the answer was.. WhatsApp. The night (or perhaps morning) ended with me proposing for a diary swop when we retire but sadly, it was rejected. I guess many of us do have secrets we want to keep till the day we die. Oops.
I believe I started my first diary at 10 or perhaps 11. It is one of those random free-ring notebooks with lines. If you see it from the outside, you wouldn’t even take a second glance of it and suspect it could be such an important book. In that book, on the first page, I recall writing a list of names of people who will be given the privilege of reading it after I pass away someday. All these are based on my memory, and I refuse to dig them out right now cause I don’t think I can deal with my embarrassing younger self within such a short period of time. To be honest, I’m curious to know how many of those names written within are people that I am still in touch with today. If my memory didn’t fail me, I don’t know how much truth I wrote in these books because a part of me always had a suspicion that someone would read it eventually. I had code names for people which I don’t even know if I am able to recall these code names. Back then, I remember telling myself that if it was a code name I can’t remember, it was possibly not worth remembering anyway. I guess this could be a fun year-end activity if I do have some spare time. It’s gonna be cringe and funny but then again, didn’t I want things to be this way? If not, why did I wrote so much back in those days?
My next book was a purple bear design which I started in 2003. Apart from just writing, I also started pasting random ‘memories’ like movie stubs inside the book. Movies seem like a big deal for me when I was at that age. It was something a little on the pricier side of activities, yet something I don’t do that often so there are some movies that I can remember watching with some people but those were really the younger school days. Right now at my age, I can’t even recall the last movie I paid to watch >< After that book ended, I think I shifted to a lineless black book. I love the lineless book because it gave me the freedom to draw. That book was from 2005 to 2008/10 I think and then I shifted to another book which was actually some ‘scheduler’ which I didn’t use. I just used the empty lines for writing. Book number 4 was the thinnest book of it all, and then 2016 came, and I bought the book specifically for the purpose of a diary. Right now, this is still my ‘active’ book but I think I write less than 6 times a year in the past 5 years. I started using the other pages for other random things like listing out the number of vacation trips I had per year and random things like my bazi analysis. The pages should run out in about 2 to 3 years time, but I guess it would be a good time to start something new when I.. move out to my own place. That’s if I am still continuing the tradition of writing.
To be honest, I have no idea what to do with all these relics from my younger days. It is seriously too embarrassing and boring for random people in my life to read it given that I have no Significant Other. Like who else would even be interested in my day to day musings. Maybe one day when I’m retired or have nothing better to do, I could type it all out and have AI read it out for me. You know I tried the AI-reading function on my website that day and gosh it does sound really hilarious. I went back to my earlier entires back in the 2010s and had the voice of my writing play out to me as background music. It was super cringeworthy, but still a fun memory of a moment in my younger days.
Apart from all these diaries, another book in my possession is those ‘friendship books’ that we had. Those that we exchanged and write for each other and you get to list things like your likes/dislikes for music, colurs, animals and also you could do up this friend tier listing which could be gold/silve/bronze ranking. I haven’t seen that book (I think I had 2) in a really long time but I’m pretty sure it is somewhere in my room cause I am a hoarder. Looking at the amount of trash and mess in my room, packing up is gonna be extremely tough 🙁 Maybe one day after I pass on, my book can somehow be an exhibit in the museum kids in the 90s or something. It could give a window for the younger ones, how life used to be like in the past. Like how I am very curious about the lives my parents/grandparents led, maybe someone out there would be curious about me like how ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ got so popular. Who knows, one day or.. is it a ‘Day One’ kind of idea?
So.. my friend has a box of letters but guess what, I do have them too. A couple many years ago, I did take some of them out to read as I was sorting the letters into the ‘phases of life’ or by ‘friend groups’. The bulk of my letters came from when I was 14 to 15 where we were all emo kids trying to release somewhat of our emotions via writing. It’s funny because most of my letters I received were more of like my friends problems and some of the content trying to address my problem but because I only had one side of the evidence, the story was sometimes not that coherent. We used to write so many letters back in the days. Before the day of internet and social media, I used to spend my weekday afternoons reply letters to my friend. So you know we all wrote to whoever who was willing to give a reply, so there were times I had to write my problems out like three to four times cause I wanted to tell that many people. There are friends who ‘respond’ within a day/recess, while you have other friends that reply you two weeks later and I’m sure there are many letters I’ve written which did not receive a reply. ouch. Apart fom the letters, we still had the christmas cards. I used to spend a lot of effort on handmaking christmas gifts for my friends but after some time, I came to the conclusion that whatever I was doing was just simply creating more trash for the universe and I stopped in abruptly. Oops. I sometimes still buy gifts if I find something useful but other times, I’m just perfectly fine to show up empty handed and be at peace with it. Most of the time I bake/cook too so I guess it’s not exactly empty handed. I just didn’t want to give non-perishables anymore. Maybe some day, when we have all retired and have nothing better else to do in our lives, we can do a meetup and match the letters and read them as a continuous storyline. Having only owned half of the memories, it does feel somewhat empty when I read them. I don’t know how many of my friends still keep those letters, and how many of them would I still be talking to in my 60s. Only time will tell.
I guess when I really do start to pack, I will have this ‘box of memories’ which would belong to things I still can’t bear to throw away. I guess it would include my yearbooks, my diaries, my letters, my printed photos (feels like something really rare these days) and I don’t know, what else? Oh, the autograph books and also the handmade gifts and other gifts that I have received over the years. Sighs, to be honest, because I am that sentimental, I would rather people not give me these things as I would have trouble parting and throwing them away. It is so tough 🙁
We are done with all these ‘physical’ relics and gosh, there are those ‘digital relics’, some of which still remain in some hard disk somewhere (I used to save msn chats for evidence of arguments), and also thanks to my past self that shifted to ‘gmail’ since 2005 (I was an early adopter), I’m gonna have a lot of digital trails of social life in my mail. You know the days where ‘chain email’ exist? Also my mum forwarding me every single thing she finds interesting (still happens now, but on WhatsApp). I just did a quick lookback on my earlier mails and most of them were just school/cca related and.. a lot of forwarded emails. It was a trend back then I guess. In the ‘sent items’, I even see my email for school and job applications. I even emailed random strangers online to ask for piano sheet music and I even made my first online purchase – a customized name necklace back in 2007. Gosh, all these memories are coming back to me and it’s simply just a reflection of how much older I am now.
It’s funny, awkward, embarrassing, but at the same time, it is still me. I’ll have to face the ‘always younger me’ memories someday, which is why I write so much in my current me state, because I know future me will always be reading. Any other suggestion on how do I deal with these phyiscal and digital relics of my past? Oh, if I am still able to locate the file, I recall that I extracted my ‘blogspot’ content from 2005 into a Word document somewhere. My diaryland pages were all gone by the time I wanted to do the digital extraction.
Anyway, if you haven’t seen the hint from the paragraphs above, I have finally bought my own place and the move would be sometime Q2/3 next year 😀 It was that ‘big and expensive’ decision that I mentioned about in the previous post..
Cheers^^