"this moment contains all moments"

Photographer: David Sims for Cacharel

I'm sitting with friends, one of whom I've known since I was 10, the other, since I was 13, and it's her last day in Singapore, before she leaves for New Zealand, where she now lives. I'm eating a huge sandwich that's good, but frankly, something I could make at home and for a lot less money, but it doesn't matter because the salad is topped with sesame seeds and this makes us all laugh because we remember the time one of us made tofu patties sprinkled with sesame seeds but it was really a sesame fest with a bit tofu underneath. We're going to miss our Antipodes-bound friend but we don't talk about it and the sun is shining through the window and light catches in her hair and on the water glasses, but it's cold in the restaurant. I'm wearing a favourite cardigan, the same cardigan I wore when we all took an agonisingly long 13-hour bus ride on a trip, and two of us needed the toilet so badly that we were on the verge of tears.

I'm sitting here, writing this, wearing the same cardigan, thinking about how I was so busy at work that I missed her message saying bye to all of us, and thinking damn, she was gone before I knew it, and when will we all be in the same room again, because this is what happens to friends sometimes, as time passes - other lands call to us and oceans spring up in between, and the four of us sit on three different continents. We gave her a cardigan too, for her birthday, and maybe it will hold for her the same kind of memories and thoughts, the way my own slightly pilled, slightly fuzzy cardigan has the power to recall things that makes me feel like I'm sitting there again, in that restaurant, having an (overpriced) lunch, surrounded by flowers, light, and the laughter of friends.

P.S: Quote is by C S Lewis - I'm taking it slightly out of context here, but only slightly.

Pictures from tfs