A Moment To Remember

Which piece of memory would you take to eternity?

Hold that thought and then consider about it at the end of this entry.

A dozen of years ago, I caught this Japanese art flick offering a refreshing preceptive on afterlife. After one dies, the film claimed, one hovers in an administrative custom-like office for a week. With service-oriented staff members interviewing the dead, processing the queue with slide shows and pamphlets explaining the afterlife process. The dead would be shown the course of their lives in a small room with bulks of video tapes. Each slices of the very details of their lives reeled on the television like a familiar movie. After which, the dead will fill up a form, indicting which would be their decided favorite memory of their lives.

When a week was up, the dead would be shown the clip of the memory they loved and forever they would live in those seconds of memory.

How wonderful would that be?

Which piece of memory would you take to eternity then?

I used to have one that I would take it with me to afterlife. That one moment I would forever be embedded in, living every breathing seconds of it in eternity.

When I was a nursing student, I had a very brief romance with a girl which I affectionately named 'Wang Xiao Jie' (Miss Wang). It lasted only a week and was rather loop-sided. My recovery phase from it was me spending my nights blasting her favorite song 'First Love' on my part-time job working in the Arcade. Every single night, for seven whole hours, the gamers would have to endure non-stop looping of that Hikaru Utada's hit. Nights and nights at the closing of the Bedok Funland, I sat in a corner behind the counter stoning to that song.

Of course, that wasn't the favorite memory. But that was how much WXJ meant to me in those days.

My favorite memory which I would bring to eternity, was one exhaustive night after my nursing attachment, I went to meet her at a bustop near her house. I sat at the plastic seat as she approached. I was too tired to even to stand up and greet her. As she stood erected in front of me, I just simply laid my head softly on her tummy and she hugged my head. I remembered the flashing taxis, the orangish street lights, the suffocating shadows of the night and the burden of my tiredness completely erased by her touch.

That was what I would spent eternity in.

Then again, it would be so wrong to immortalise WXJ in such a way after she ripped my heart carelessly like cheap kindergarten colored papers.

Because unlike me, beneath our touch, she felt no real love nor loss for me.

This week, I took some time between my nodding off on the train on my way to work and feeding patient against the sunny backdrop of Novena, to redefine my favorite peel of memory.

As I floated around the hopes, dashing of hopes, misery, a ray of light, tears and eyes of utter despair in the hospital, I decided to take on that question more casually.

Maybe my favorite memory is still on its way.

It might be late, but it will come. It will be awesome.

What about you?

Which piece of memory would you take to eternity?