Left Behind by Time

According to the special theory of relativity, the closer you can travel to the speed of light relative to others, the slower time flows for you relative to others. This means that if you hop onto a rocket and zoom away at a very fast speed, when you come back to earth, while one hour has passed for you, 10,000 years might have passed on earth. Thus, travelling on a very very fast vehicle (I am talking about something at the magnitude of millions of metres per second, which is unmatched by any transport we have) is akin to taking a trip into the future.

Of course, no body has done that before; travel into the future that is. But I sometimes got the feeling that I have been left behind in time while the whole world has moved forward. This is particularly so when I saw a friend getting married. I remembered this instance in which I was walking at Bugis MRT in my usual distracted way when out of nowhere a friend from secondary school whom I have not seen for years suddenly popped up of nowhere. In the confused conversation that follows, she invited me to the wedding ceremony at her church and the dinner that follows. I attended the former but not the latter since I am (1) really broke at that time and I din want to put auspicious letters like "Have a blissful marriage" into the red packet to substitute for the lack of cash and (2)I had first hand experience at been stuck at a eight course dinner in which I know almost nobody else other than my family beside me. Anyway, 2 weeks later, me and another mutual friend found ourselves standing and sitting piously for a 2 hour wedding ceremony at her church (gosh, I din know that the ceremony can be so long and involved so many instances when we have to stand up and then sit down again, and I thought that a church wedding is so much like in the movie when the pastor just go: "blah blah blah, will you take lalala as your husband..?" and then just exchange rings, kiss the bride and off you go in that fancifully decorated car to wherever newly weds go).

That was when I experienced this sense of disjoint in time. It was like not too long ago that this friend of mine was still in that nurse-like uniform that gals from my school have to wear and put up with and suddenly the white cloth of that one piece uniform had transformed itself into the elegant white wedding gown. Looking at myself, I realised I still seemed to be the old "me", perhaps a little bit for the wiser compared to the nerd in my secondary school days, but well... no major change in life yet. I still get remarks from people I have not seen for some time saying "hey, you still look the same." I wonder if time has quite stopped for me while the rest of the world moved on.

As I write, 3 of my former JC classmates were already married and 2 more are "on the way", with the earlier one coming this october. I could still recall vividly these friends in their uniforms but while the images were still fresh in my mind, they had moved from students to the working class and now to full womanhood, wife and if our gahmen's incentives are effective, mother soon. Now I really do understand what it means when an Ah Peh or Ah Mah looked at a man/woman when they had last seen him/her as a boy/gal and said "I am getting old". This is what it feels like to be left behind by the fast flowing river of time...........