went and met up with some friends in Puchong. Jo has been back in m'sia for a short break and will be leaving for Belgium end of this month to continue her phD.

i have to apologize to other friends because the whole session i have selfishly consumed Jo all by myself and endlessly chatted away. maybe because we shared similar experiences and once the topic about that particular university, course and people presented itself, we couldn't stop. and of course, no one else know who we were so eagerly discussing about and how certain classes with lecturers and tutors can be so... worth discussing the whole night.

from dealing with rude and cold treatment from the bureaucracy to meeting people and coping with the tough academic environment, it stirred up some old haunting memories.

it is all still fresh and ongoing for Jo's experiences but i could hardly recall the names now. there were new people whom i don't know, and old ones who has already left the department. it was afterall, events which happened more than 3.5 years ago. they somehow felt so strange and distant now. but yet when recounted, felt like yesterday.

i couldn't sleep after that mainly due to the coffee i took during the night. :) but also was pondering about this...

Jo told me that one of the lecturer i know from this absurbly impossible course "Computational solutions to Wave Equations" committed suicide shortly after i left. She is a transsexual. she or rather he used to be married to a lady also working in the same academic department and they have a son together. then he decided to change into... a woman and he left the wife and son. and he/she has a boyfriend afterwards, also working in the same department. (Dave is accountable for the validity of this story which he so dramatically narrated over too many glasses of wine on the last night of summer school.)

i had just thought she is a very tall and slender woman with a manly voice throughout the course. never really doubted she is indeed a he until someone reminded me about his adam's apple. i shall also forever remember her long nails with pink/red? nail polish spread out on the table when we had our 1 to 1 oral exam. traumatic times.

i hated that course. i hated her. i failed that course.

but she/he was a very capable and knowledgeable person, although not much so a good lecturer. we didn't talk. besides the part where she told me that i will probably fail the course and have to complete the project which i have not a clue in hell how ever am i going to do that.

i guess after all the things that she has gone through and people's perception, she didn't manage to find a true place where she belongs.

time passed. and in this case, she... passed on.

it is indeed a sad story. all these talk about the past, reminds me of this quote~



"In a strange way, I miss that year, because all those possibilities that existed then are gone."

"It didn't seem unlikely to me that he could walk through a door or could appear behind a bush. It was a year of very magical thinking, and in some ways I'm sad to be moving further and further away from it."

- Michelle Williams on Heath ledger's death -