Moving Forward Part 1

Part 1

 Frost3d and I had been chatting online for a couple of weeks now and, in a strangely pleasant way, I was getting very fond of someone I had never before met in real life. The conversations were rocky at first, timid on his end, because he knew who I was and I didn’t even know his name, but we gradually warmed up to each other, and I just thought of him as Frost3d, which, if you think about it, rolls off the tongue in a rather adorable way. I found him to be thoughtful and funny, and lonely, which made both of us and worked especially well for me because most of the boys I talked to online were either horny, vapid, stupid or a tragic combination of all three. We had met in early 2004 on a gay networking site and he figured out who I was from my more or less indiscreet profile; it so turned out we were in the same year in the same school, which of course lent our conversations a little intrigue.

            “I saw you in school today, was walking behind you actually.”

            “OMG, you stupid voyeur. It was very rude of you not to say hi, then.”

            “I was distracted by your bag.”

            “How come?”
            “It was very smelly.”

It was silly things like that which helped brighten up school, which, while not entirely un-enjoyable, was almost cheerless. If you have never been to a Singapore junior college, all you’re missing is dusty floors, chipped paint on walls, lots of concrete and plastic tables with skinny metal legs, heat, sweat and faded school uniforms. There is invariably a large open space with wooden benches for studying, half-hearted greenery- shrubbery, more like (always bougainvilleas)- fluorescent lighting and a pond (koi or terrapins, depending on what kind of people attend your school). Mix all that up and no matter what you get, it’s probably a Singapore junior college. Add in the chatter of students, which you must play back as a low murmur with the occasional “oh my god”, plus the smells of fear and stress, and you’ve got a pretty good idea. It does not sound like a pleasant place because, in truth, it isn’t. Junior college exists to sift out those who Can from those who Cannot, those who Have from those who Have Not- if it were not so, then I wouldn’t have so many friends struggling as we speak to find places in schools that will accept their otherwise useless A level certificates. A place like that could drive you insane and, for some, also churns out the worst in you.

 That said, I was doing well in such environs, despite the gloom, mainly because I was the well-adjusted, sociable sort. My classmates and I, arts students as we were, would sit at the library, skiving off homework and classes to discuss the finer points of some tragically awkward new relationship or the various mis-pronouncements of tragically ineloquent teachers. Often, we would sit in the stuffy canteen and, surveying the swathes of humanity before us, tut meaningfully and misquote Voltaire or Marx or Orwell or whoever we thought might have sounded appropriately clever at the moment. ‘The masses’, I believe, centred quite heavily in our conversations. In short, we were a bunch of lazy, congenital assholes, though in the best of all possible ways.

I loved my friends, but no one in school knew about me, except for the other gay boys who frequented our school’s thread on the gay forums where, nightly, I would see the gathering of lonely gay boys in search of like others with whom they, fine we, could entertain thoughts of schoolboy romances and hidden gay fantasies, by which I mean nothing sordid, just a manifestation of the “he’s cute and I hope he’s gay” state of mind.