Growing up sucks

I bumped into a really old friend yesterday: someone called my name behind a rack of clothes in TopShop, so I located the source of that voice to a face which took me quite awhile to register the name of. Ah, WL! I said after around 10 seconds, and we both chuckled at how bad my memory was. You can't blame me. What stood ahead of me was an unfamiliar young well-dressed, formal-long-sleeved-shirt-wearing chap with that obligatory Mont Blanc pen sticking outta his shirt pocket. This was the same fellow that once donned Green Day T-shirts and bermudas and had his hair went through the oddest of all shades in the limited spectrum of colours available in hair dye.

We were not like best of buddies, but hung out enough to do silly things like organise a school gig, form a drama club, and stealing tidbits from the lousy food-vending machine in school.

And now he's some sales executive, looking much ready to close big deals and projects, found whacking metal pointer tips against colourful graphs and pie-charts during meetings.

And so we tried to catch up. We talked of work. We talked of future plans. We talked of the common friends between us we had back in those days: our 2 rebellious, me-against-the-system friends had signed on to the army, and the other friends, the ones that were once closed to but no longer talked to.

Towards the end of our short meet I did the si bei formal, business-like thing by asking for his namecard, and coincidentally he ran out of them. And so we did the let me take down your number thing, whipping out our respective handphones, and then finding out that we still had each other's up-to-date contacts. I asked him for the possibly hang out at some gig in the near future with the old gang, and he said why not. But perhaps we were just being nice and formal to each other, knowing that the numbers in our phones is not going to reunite anything or anyone.

And when we said our goodbyes, re-joining our respective friends, I kena the sad realisation: We have grown up. And that kinda suck.