EW22

Disclaimer: please read this series of posts starting from EW29, then backwards.

Just like the stained black cardigan I wore for a whole year, your white uniform from School Of Hospitality is symbolic of 2013 and west side stations. There is a memory of you walking towards me on Jurong East platform, the first time personally seeing you in it.

Memories are easy to see and sometimes smell, but I can also still feel the fabric of this shirt in my hands. This ITE shirt would turn into your booking in/out uniform, into a white Uniqlo button-down you wore to your office at Police Cantonment Complex, and eventually into the very light blue shirt you wear beneath your SilkAir vest today.

You were insecure in it back then, but I didn't know how to convince you that I was smitten. The ITE logo was so faint on your pocket, but you couldn't stop wondering what the polytechnic kids were thinking of as they looked at you.

They weren't my own schoolmates, but the station was already swarming with students. They flooded the bus that we took to my new school as well, and we held on to each other for dear life from the judgemental eyes. These people were about to be my comrades in a week's time, walking the same steps and bearing the same Ngee Ann Polytechnic logo on our student cards.

It didn't take long for the both of us to realise I'll never belong. We were never in the same high school, but our split in tertiary was proof that we were always on opposite ends. You with your ability to make and keep friends, me with my natural talent of standing out for the wrong reasons.

I already stood out on the very first day of lessons, when we were asked to announce our academic goals to the rest of class. I said I wanted to prove my parents wrong. The room went dead silent, and the lecturer asked again, Sorry? What do you want to achieve, exactly?

And I wish I'd said I just wanted a diploma, like everyone else did.

Year One went by and I remained the outcast that I was in my last year of high school. I thought a new school would help shed that skin off me, but I either tried too hard or not at all.

In the end, I chose my love for writing over education. I have no regrets, but perhaps it was another division between us; you went on to graduate from ITE with your beloved classmates while I had neither in my name.

Dover was where I got swept with the generic crowd. Funny that you were in a school that still bore uniforms, but you were blessed with classmates so different from one another. I continued taking the bus with the zombies, mindless despite the clothes on them that screamed personalities.