I was doing some cleaning up of my shelves the other night and i came across old letters and birthday cards which i kept them in a box called 'correspondences'. Started to rummage thru 'em and found some interesting stuff which i had chucked and forgot all about 'em.

I raked my grubby fingers thru the box and found, let see.. get well wishes, letters from old admirers, past birthday cards from friends, including my insurance company. Yikes! I'm such a junkie! Also found Hari Raya cards dated from as far back as 1991. Gee. I tink i was in primary school then. Also found letters. Lots of them and I started to read them...

Found letters from a Japanese penpal called Yoko Terazono. I ceased corresponding with her in my final year in Poly. For a beginner, Yoko's english was not so atrocious. She loved to send me cute japanese anime pics, which i was not interested in at all. But it wwas her straightforwardness, her limited vocabulary and halting English that often got my grinning. She was the first to send me a neo print of herself and that was way back before the neo print craze begun to hit Singapore. I had used one of her letters for my Japanese portfolio in my final year Japanese Language project and got a distinction for it *proud smile*.

Yoko loved Disney characters and had hoped to be a language interpreter at Disneyland Tokyo one day. I wonder what happened to her. When i became IT savvy *ahem*, i tried to give her my email add but somehow, due to different language and operating platforms, my email never got thru and I never hear from her again.

Ploughed some more and I found my used-to-be best friend's letters; Marini. We were good friends during our primary school years. We were inseparable. Arin was the smarter and popular one while I was her geeky, bespectacled sidekick. After PSLE, she went to a prestigious girls school while nerdy me went to a lame neighbourhood school. By then she had moved to the other side of Singapore, while i stayed put. Back when email and internet sounded alien and unfamiliar to us, we communicated via snail mail.

Arin's letters were always creative. She would do up a card for me, complete with glitters and inventive cut outs. And her letters were often long and funny. We confided in each other about teenage life, complaining about the ongoing bitchiness among girlfriends and BGRs. Coming from a girl's school, she couldnt quite understand how I could love a guy today and love another the next.

Somehow, towards the end of our secondary school years, when the pressure of the big Os started to weigh us down, her letters came less frequent. She made new friends and I made mine. Suddenly, I woke up one day and realized I couldnt click with her anymore. She couldnt get my jokes and I found our frequency had got distorted over the years. I simply couldnt communicated with her anymore. I began to talk to her less often, see her like once or twice a year, usually during Hari Raya and our birthdays. Somehow, we had drifted apart and i no longer knew her. She went to a JC and me, I chose to get my diploma. So, to sum it up, i don't even know her home number or where she has moved to now (you see, Arin's parents are one of those species who move houses every 3-4 years or so). But yes, I still have her handphone number stored, although it is one of the least dialled/smsed numbers on my phone. I guess people change with environment. I'm not sorry or sad about it. I smile when i tink about it, but i don' miss it. But i still keep her letters though, for old time's sake.

Next, i stumbled across a stack of notebooks which i called journals. In these, I had chronicled most of my school days episodes, mostly containing endless moanings and grunts of teenage angst, frustrations, curiosity and obsessions over friends, BGRs and occasionally schoolwork.

Hahaa! i couldnt believe that I'm such a normal, pessimistic, whining teenager. One that suffers from endless bouts of adolescent mood swings, stupid crushes on stupid, unworthy boys and healthy dosages of exam stress. I guess those experiences taught me a thing or two that made me who I am today.

PS: Those journals are still lying around somewhere in my room *winks*