For me, it was just this morning. But before that, it was years back. Even before I entered college.
Okay, let’s take it down a notch.
When I was in high school, my hormone was fluctuating and adolescence torrenting. I romanticized everything. It was a constant switch between torment and glee, but which ever side I was on, it felt alive. No question, I was high on my own body’s cocktails.
Among others, there was one very special ritual. I would lie down on a patch of grass or sit on the wall of my best buddy’s apartment building and just gaze at the sky. It didn’t matter if it was daybreak, twilight, or pitch black, I would always feel the great rush up my throat stronger than ever it often choked my words.
This feeling persisted up to the year when I had to drop out of school to be homeschooled to get advanced lessons to prepare for the entrance exam into Thai public university system, which were at least a year early for me. As far as I can remember, that was when it started to fade away.
I could never tell exactly what I was thinking or feeling during the ritual. It seemed likely a mix of several feelings and thoughts all at once. However, what I think was a major ingredient was hope. My hypothesis is that when my future was unbeknownst to me, my hopes and dreams became infinite and boundless.
When you tilt your head up to the sky and face its vastness, I think you are in a way traveling through time. Questions like “Where do we come from?” and “Where do we go from here?”, though may not be exactly expressed, come to mind. It is like you have been traveling this world blinded in the dark with just a flashlight to shine around the vicinity of your existence, and by looking up the sky you are given a blank map which kind of give you a hint of the proportion of yourself and everything around you rather than exactly tell you where your location is between origin and destination. You travel through time, not up and down the stream of your own life, but the path from the origin of the universe to the unbeknownst future.
Thus, when I choked looking up to the sky, I was contemplating my existence.
Apparently, going to college was not part of my plan. I was suddenly taken away from tiptoeing on my own small road that bent in the undergrowth to a concrete highway to mediocrity. I was deprived of my imagination. I became protective and invulnerable. Soon enough, I realized I had lost my time- traveling ability. The sky became just a plane of colors and clouds to me.
Years afterward, I began to whine to my best of friends about how I wished I could feel something again. That was when I realized I was yearning for it. But it never returned. No matter how I tried, it was not something forceable. It was a force I had lost.
Then, it gradually came back. It was nothing big. Just some emotions and random thoughts which kept me tilted up longer. Then my wife gave birth to our baby daughter. Suddenly, it is returning to me as fast as she grows. It was my daughter who is giving me the missing link to the unknown future — the hopes and dreams I had lost long ago. Through her, I could see possibilities and infinity. Only this time it is different.
They are hers, not mine. I am a launchpad who had been blessed with a glimpse of the endlessness this vessel is bound for. Something had rewarded me with this so that I will, to the last of my breath, propel and steer her to the infinity and beyond.