Perhaps I could link this whole existential denial to the fact that I always somehow thought Sunway was some kind of halfway house between places where I wanted to be. Correction, a halfway abode between places I thought I was meant to be.

January was spent acclimatising to new unchartered concrete and air-conditioning, crouched over a corner in the library finalizing applications and personal statements. Rejection number one, but I knew this application was going to be just right. February was spent running for the student council, organizing little sales and getting comfortable with people. In March it was back to rejection number two, and three.

Since then it has been a series of ups and lows, all finding their place in the tiny lines of my little red book. I’ve not written in my real journal because I fear that when I do open up the page I won’t have a single thing to say.

College has had a somewhat numbing effect on me. I do not go into a frenzy about some new book or a new film or some thing or another. I find no comfort in having no one to push me to my limits, no one beside me that inspires me to do more.

I have gone for months without reading the papers, except for the few weekends I actually bother buying the FT or the few evenings that I actually have the energy to read The Guardian. The stack of books I bought in December, thinking I would have to replenish by the month’s end is still the way it is; appreciated yet forlorn.

There is no spark, no fire, no drive. Farhanis tells me I don’t seem to have anything to say anymore on the phone, because that’s the way things have been. I didn’t want to say anything, and I got comfortable with saying nothing for a very long time.

There is also a sort of philistine experience when you thought you just got your way into a centre of new educational opportunities. There are no deep philosophical conversations in student cafes, the arguments you would find yourself in are pedantic and so-high-school.

People honestly don’t care. And you try to learn not to care too.

I’ve got a backlog of emails I’ve not replied because I just can’t seem to put myself to say the things I should have months ago. I’m sorry if I don’t reply your messages either, or picked up your calls. And I know why you’re doing that to me too.

It’s one thing pushing something away and hoping it’ll never come back and having to pull it back and work things better.

Oh God, why are all my posts so fucking depressing?

This past month has seen an exodus of students who would lug big bottles of water and their thick, earth-shattering ring folders, making homes out of the otherwise empty carrels. You know it’s exam season when you have to comb through rows of seats to find none un-occupied nor used as a sleeping pod.

In the midst of my own last-minute revision (can there ever be such a thing as consistent revision in the classical system?), I find myself in moments of wanton distraction and thought. As beautiful as it may sound, being surrounded by shelves heavy with discourses on history, to the more often read pop-psychology, to literature and beyond, I can’t help but feel that there is something sterile and unromantic about Sunway’s library.

Is it the overhead fluorescent lighting? Perhaps its the pallid depressed looking inhabitants, blasting bad screamo music from supposedly cool emo headphones. Maybe it’s just that sometimes the library feels like a temporary hide-out for people wanting to get some a/c.

I sometimes wonder how it must be like for the librarians. Do they go to work everyday feeling like they’ve been given a purposeful existence? Do they feel like it is their task, their god-given duty to sow the seeds of intellect into the apathetic post-pubescent? Or do they just arrive at 8.00 a.m. like most of us, to start another 8 hours of card scanning and book arranging?

Philip Larkin wrote a bulk of his poetry while working as a librarian at Hull University, my sister’s alma mater. He’s probably the most oft-quoted British post-war poet (‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, anyone?) who I’ve still not found an opportunity to slip into in any of my GP essays. There’s always this underlying tone of nostalgia and regret, of loss and premature wisdom about his stuff. The sad meaningless sex, the sad meaningful sex, and the constant struggle to search for that something deeper, the intimacy beyond the sex.

Sometimes I wonder if the quiet man behind the check out counter has some sort of Larkin-like life after he punches out at five. Does he take the free shuttle bus home to a small apartment filled with half-drunk coffee mugs, leaving brown stain rings on stacks of papers he’s been working on for months? Does he smoke away his nights, lounging around in a kain pelikat and a milo ais, as he nurses some Perec or Le Clezio?

How does it feel dedicating your life to such a sturdy unchanging place where its visitors are constantly changing and leaving? Do they resent our youth, our temporary existence in the air-conditioned cement and steel space? Do they too hope for a day when they would leave the carpet for better pavements elsewhere? Or do they, like Larkin, find the place a temporary residence to rest their everyday existence, as they nurture their other lives elsewhere?

Either way, while I see the same faces everyday, we never have spoken more than the usual card, grunt, thank you. They don’t care whether I’m borrowing something they know I won’t make head or tail of (Pure Mathematics, Longman Publishing, 1993), neither do they respond to my exuberance upon finding something long catalogued, unread, and hard to find (The Story of Penguin, Jeremy Lewis).

Not that I’m asking for everyday chance encounters with the 80s hairdo man where he would pontificate about Ayn Rand or something, but just that it seems to me everything in the library seems like a transaction.

The sterility of the place comes from how it is only used when it is needed, and never seen as anything else otherwise. A place for a nap, for those last minute homework completions, to facebook your status (is Bored and Tired and omggggg hungry la!), and of course, to study for the tedious exams that everyone’s lives seem to revolve around.

No conversation about some new piece of literature, no soul-searching, existential struggle. No poetry from no prose-filled mind.

Early this year, a friend of mine was having trouble locating the Economics section and was given a rather disgruntled answer when the object of her search was in fact a row behind her.

Dear reader, can you blame me for thinking what the answer would be if I chose to ask, “I am looking for the Critic for Pure Reason”, and being answered,

“We’ve been looking for that for a while, too”.

//

Holding hands beneath the table in the auditorium; as the lecturer at the podium tries her best to preach the values of tolerance and harmony, while not actually practicing it herself.
Knowing that we are the only example of this; as my fingers encircle your palm, as your thumb slides down around my wrist: as we make a step into the unknown. Knowing, we are the epitome of what this class stands for. A bond that neither of us ever thought we’d know.

//

The comfort of new strangers. Making space and making time to accommodate people unknown before.
Yong Tau Foo in the cafeteria before a rushed and soporific economics class. Slow walks to the cab stop to catch a ride to the mall, books : left behind. Heartfelt conversations about the new life that we share together, as we huddle in dirty cosy cafes. Finishing our iced teas before running back to campus in the rain.
Bonds made : new.

Between those free hours I have noticed that the boy sitting in front of me has arch-long legs like a raphaelite beauty; the soles of his shoes seeing better days. We  speed past the park and I can’t stop laughing. Minutes later; I am relishing the feel of the humid breeze running through my hair as I zoom past the neighbourhood on a bicycle that is not mine.

So here I am. Sitting in the mamak nursing one two many neslo-ais-kosong/teh-si-ais-kosong, listening to an Indian man reason out why this year Anwar will win. My New-Statesman dealer is off gallivanting in Morocco and Switzerland, and I can no longer have the energy to keep up my old habits. I am growing old.

And here I am, too. Waiting impatiently outside the principal’s office with translated copies of the same proposal. I  am worried, because I need everything in black and white. After all those years of learning, I am now left at the helm. Holding on with fear, holding on happily.

Anna Wintour, Tyler Brule, Marvin Scott Jarrett.

My bedroom floor is littered with magazines that I have yet to finish reading; old and new; and the polo-t-shirts of my brother’s that I have now claimed mine. There is a bouquet of dying flowers decomposing in my kitchen, and earrings on my dresser that I won’t be able to wear. He is beautiful, but he doesn’t mean a thing to me.

My laptop, feeling, looking forlorn. There are so many emails I need to write, too many I need to reply. My Wordpress screaming PATCHMEUPDATEMEDE-SPAMME.

To my friends here and away; hope you all are very well. I am alive, but I am hardly ever here.