If anyone still reads this, I know it's been awhile... すごく長い時間な。。。But well, this is more for myself anyway. In the words of a quiet but admirable senior, a reminder of what's important to me now. 私にとって大事なものです。

At present, my house is currently under renovation and as such, the past few weeks (well, the past few weeks starting from the first week of November) were mostly spend either sussing out what on earth we need for the renovation, doing my own pack or most interestingly packing for my mum (Whom I love very much, but she is the biggest squirrel of toiletries I've ever seen).

In the process, I've come across odds and ends of the most unexpected kind such as Watson's plastic bags with the old logo, some 50 odd toothbrushes, bar soaps and razors pilfered from hotels and airplanes only to be sequestered away in the hidey hole that is her bathroom. (お母さん。。。この習慣は大問題だ。。。これを続ければ、うちはどんなに広くても空きが足らないよ。。）

After getting over the shock that was her bathroom, I eventually moved towards her closets, cupboards and shelves where I found boxes of old letters, piggy banks my sisters and I used when we were kids, and collections of things I think she thought fit her personality the best. Not very different from the drawings and "art" of my sisters and I that kept popping up while we cleared the rest of the house (母さんが好きな物」と言ってた）. With the way my family deals with such matters, it didn't quite play out like the simultaneously dramatic and touching cliche we see in movies where a son discovers the diary of his somewhat estranged father whilst clearing the attic one day or a daughter finding the undelivered letters of her presumed dead mother (if you have trouble conjuring up that image... just for you Potter fans... think Harry watching the dying Snape's memories). The stock of "I heart Mummy thing things" became a lighthearted jab at my Mum's hording tendencies... although deep down, I think we appreciate the sentiment behind her actions

Regardless of the dissimilarity of our reactions to Hollywood portrayal, what remains the same is the sense that we, even with the people we think are most familiar with, will never fully know (and can't possibly know) someone. As I dusted off and repacked my mum's exchanges with her sister, my mum fondly reminisced the affectionate nicknames they assigned to each other, the "good old days". Given their age gap and the little else of their relationship I could piece together, and I would never have imagined them relating to each other in such a playful manner. These facets and nuances, as much as they make up the other which we see, are also indefinitely denied to us (well via first hand observation anyway). If this is true for people we are close to, people we have known our whole lives... what is there to say of people we meet when we are 10, 20, 30, or even older? Existence sounds lonely now.

Perhaps I'm overstating the importance of history. After all, we are beings of a mere hundred years or much less. Worse, we often forget and the influence of the past in lost in some way. Even so, when I reflect on past events and how differently I relate to both new and old friends today, there is a desire for human connection to be more convenient, to not have to explain to someone everything they've missed or to have to relate with stories told rather than experienced. Kinda lazy isn't it. On second thought, that might take the fun out of discovering a person though. Things that are convenient are rarely fun anyway.