in a year like this

What gave them this joy?
What made cold and hungry people so sure that another year could only be better?

- Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
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in a year like this that unfolded so placidly, almost inevitably, it's hard to pinpoint defining moments. it's probably the first time in my life that i feel my age, and by that i mean i am beginning to feel aged. more than once i'd pressed my fingers into my cheeks to try to remember how quite taut it still feels, though i'm sure to forget as i live on. i'm not afraid of growing old; i welcome it; i look forward to being in my 50s, 60s, 70s, maybe even my 80s, and peering back at how this life has turned out, for better or not. but i'm at this prime age of twenty-eight, my imminent physical disintegration should be the stuff of fantasy.

when i was twenty-two and diagnosed with cancer, i didn't have much an idea what it really meant - not the illness, but the nature and the consequences of being such afflicted. one is at the mercy of nature's unpredictable nature, so to speak, and medical science can only know and do so much. i was in the operating theatre for nine hours, and i often wondered if death was like the moment before the general anesthetic kicked in through the oxygen mask, when then, all consciousness stopped, like one had stepped off a cliff and lay suspended mid-air, and simply time-stopped-suspended, unconsciousness and darkness and nothingness, and nothingness, until one hears a faraway voice repeating gently, 'jack, your operation's over.' what had gone on in the time between? do i now know what death feels like? maybe.

the following year my younger sister was involved in a car accident. she and her friend was crossing the road when a van beat the red light. her friend survived and my sister did not. what had she been thinking in the seconds, minutes, hours, days before her final moment? probably just as how everyone else bumps through life in a sorta auto-pilot way, with thoughts of life and death far away on far opposite ends. but she did laugh a lot and was a cheerful, kindhearted kid who brought joy to people around her. do i know how death feels like? maybe. when someone you love dies, there can be hundreds and thousands of words to describe that feeling and all of them combined would still be inaccurate and inadequate.

when mortality wages it's war so near it's difficult to be jolly and jaunty. events like these turned me taciturn and circumspect, and it's not an entirely bad outcome, though sometimes i admire how people could smile so readily, party so hard, their souls not a crack of worry. sometimes i admire how people have it so easy. sometimes i remind myself not to be too cynical. and sometimes i am thankful for what i have, and look forward to another morning.

a placid, uneventful 2007 has in itself been a blessed one - i had an immensely rewarding time teaching, and there've been my friends, family, loved ones all. there is another year that has come, hopefully it would be a good one too.

have a merriest new year.