I am not here. You may ask me where I went.

restart

Today I became civilian again. Like all other endings in real life it really wasn't as dramatic as people tend to make it out to be, but it was a comfort to reach a milestone that seemed so distant at the journey's start.

It's been a long road here; I was never able to imagine how things would have turned out through this part of my life: it seemed like a distant part of growing up which I somehow thought I could skip... I remember my mind used to completely blank-out at the thought of being eighteen. I somehow believed (or pathetically hoped) that by some obscure miracle I'd be spared from the humiliation of enlistment and never see the face of adulthood. But here am I twenty, tall and walking. Here am I, past this hurdle. Here am I.

I feel old.

The weeks leading up to this day have been quite terrible. There were a few occasions when I felt more than ready to rattle here about how badly my service was promising to end. Things were going sour and I was being sour, and really, I don't have the heart to dwell in on it in any further detail.

I got a letter from a, well, I don't know what to call him. We were friends. I thought he was someone who I could trust... I still think he makes a great friend, but he's seeing things differently. But I'm glad he wrote back. He had answers.

He is probably the first and only friend I've ever fallen out with. I don't really know what to think of it. In some ways a cold ending is better than a heated one, but I still feel lost. There are moments when I think that all the hard lessons I learnt about the fleetingness of friendship was preparing me for this.

I've just got to move on.

twenty two months later.

Through this I have discovered in me my good and my ugly, or at least a part of it, and the revelation of which has been thoroughly encouraging and humbling; and if this is what it means to mature as a person, then I want to never stop growing. It will not matter that I will fail, and keep failing, even as a person: It will not matter that I will be misunderstood, and that there will be people who may not like me: I will take on all that Life has to offer me, sour or sweet, and I will emerge from it a better person; I will be more of who I am.

I want to never stop growing.