After two weeks (and probably more) of T-shirt-and-shorts wardrobe combinations, sleepless late nights and overall suffocating torture that could only mean the starting of mock exams week, on the last day of exams, ten of us went out for a much-needed necessary trip to KL to replenish our dried up souls and spirits. And indeed, it was a day/night to remember.
The last paper on Friday was Pure Maths 1, and as soon as it ended at 11AM, all thoughts of exams and chemical equations and mathematical formulae were temporarily thrown out of the metaphorical window to jumpstart this celebration I reckoned I properly deserved after all the shitty weeks I’ve been through for exams.
There were many different tangents to the curve of this post-exams celebration, but ours went like this: Danny’s house, shopping at KL, Jogoya and then whatever comes after that. So with Harris as our esteemed driver, we went to Danny’s house first, where we ordered pizza delivery service (care was taken not to fill up our stomachs too much to brace ourselves for the royal feast that was Jogoya later that night) and basically just chilled. And then around 2PM we left because Harris, Guinevere, Danny and Gerald had a movie to catch at Pavilion at 2.30PM and we were already running quite late.
At KL, the four of them rushed for the movie while Bellyn, Taliza, Irfan, Chok and I went (window) shopping around Sungei Wang Plaza, H&M (where I got a mesh shirt for a photoshoot the next day), Lot 10 and KLCC (where I spent RM100 book vouchers on David Levithan books hahahahahaha). And then it was 5.30PM and we had to walk the arduously long walkway back to Pavilion and then to Starhill where we met up with everyone else who had gone off on different tangents (Austin and Ian, and the movie bunch).
As soon as I entered Jogoya, the surrealism of the night started to set in. Besides the grandeur that is Jogoya, just being there with all my favourite people having a royal Japanese buffet right into the night felt otherworldly and ethereal. As if we were just sitting for our P1 paper that morning! And it was exactly this sudden overwhelm of emotions that set me off a little, as I dived into a hazy stupor and tried to keep myself from bursting into an explosion of tears or laughter; anything at all to release the overwhelmingness of it all. That would just be weird, so I kept it under check the entire time. The accumulated exhaustion throughout the week also decided to smack me right in the face at the same time so that helped a little.
After dinner, not surprisingly, we had mini dance parties on the escalators and elevators of Starhill, everyone on an apparent high that I couldn’t deny I didn’t see coming. We wandered around Pavilion for a while, and then the outside streets of KL until we decided to just chill at Tous Les Jours where everyone went off on different talking tangents again. And that’s all we did well into the night: talking. And it felt, well, exactly like that overrated term coined by Stephen Chbosky in The Perks of Being A Wallflower. Infinite.
And then it was almost midnight and I was so close to dozing off, that kind of exhaustion tinged with nausea and not knowing exactly where you are. So everyone said their goodbyes (“see you next week!”s) and Gerald, Irfan, Bellyn and I climbed into the Austin mobile, and the entire ride home was just…splendid. Bellyn was the DJ and the KL nighttime landscape was the brilliant view and I’d say the ride home itself was comparable to the fun of the entire day itself.
Back at SMR, after parting ways with Bellyn at the elevator, I found myself caught in the in-between of fatigue and restlessness (such an unbelievable paradox but believe me it exists) and it pretty much went on throughout the entire night, leading to only three hours of restless sleep that night, as my brain continuously and involuntarily replayed the night’s surreal events in my brain over and over again, overwhelmed. But grateful. Grateful for all these people in my life whom I trust not only to have fun with but the not-so-fun parts as well. And that, is my greatest gratitude and fortune of all.
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michelle teoh 