Everyone Needs A Superman.

Sometimes she felt as if life were a masquerade. An eternal ball choked with incognito partygoers. Every angle she glance, every faceless person her eyes fleeted across, it was just a kaleidoscope of superficial beauty.

And more often than not, the charlatans shielded behind the dull glitter of their sequin-crusted crimson half-face masks or the beneath the folds of feathers of their handheld embroidered Columbine Venetian masks, would return her gaze with a wan smile - a smile that reeked of false pretenses.

She shirked away, stung and wounded. But what hurt the most was having a familiar face shoved deliberately at her. Someone she thought she knew like the back of her hand. Could it be Lily, her tiny-framed lab partner who would scrounge her nose disapprovingly at her messy handwriting? Or Shay, who endured with her years of sun-tanning sessions, training together on the same basketball team? But as she stared, the features, or what was left exposed, blended together and blurred and she would be left blinking in confusion. It would be just another concealed face in a crowd. Had she none true friends, then?

People change, she rationed. But a small voice countered, so should you. Ignorance isn’t bliss. Invulnerability is.

She shook her head in frustration. Whether it was at life itself, or the way life had made everyone, she could not tell. Like an unwritten rule of the transition into a ‘custom’ hormone-ranging adolescent, make-up had became some sort of an imperial aegis, an impenetrable armor to hide flaws and serve to inspire awe and, perhaps, fear. Please. If embellishing a farmer with a king’s sword would not make him a skilled swordsman, how would anointing cosmetics make any difference to a person’s beauty? At least not more than skin-deep, she thought.

Of course, she did not always just mean the physical make-up.

But slowly, like a sun dipping into the horizon, she was beginning to accept that. Appearance first, the heart later; a book was always judged by its cover. No one was more important than you; was not that why ‘I’ written in capital?

Her fingers curled around the edges of her mask, eyes scrutinizing the surroundings for the umpteenth time. Her ears pricked for the rhythmic clopping of hoofbeats, on which horse her savior would come a-rescuing, or the sweet chime of midnight. Neither transpired.

She sighed in resignation. So be it. Her fingers quavered as she lifted her mask to her face; tears glistened as it inched closer. Her eyelids fluttered down, if this was what she had to do to survive…

Her hand paused. A light pressure lingered on her arm, holding her back. She looked up. Her brows crinkled, it was not a face she had come across before. But it was a beautiful one – one without a mask. And such lovely eyes, no, not because of the colour, which, she noticed, was a shade darker than her light brown ones. No, it was the softness in them. And her tomato-red cheeks seemed to be glowing.

Then, as if it were the most natural thing to do, the girl took her hand and led her through the throng of people, though it suddenly seemed to her they were merely a sea of puppets, the materialistic world their puppeteer.

And, like a fog dissipating in the heat of the morning sun, she began to notice unveiled faces amidst the masses; roses among thorns. How had she overlooked…?

She peered towards the girl. And somehow, she knew her name. She just knew.

“Thank you, Amanda.”

The other girl smiled.

After a day in Sunway Lagoon. Were fiddling with my hay-wired video camcorder/sound recorder/mp3 player.

When imMoral projects still haunt us.

Must have annoyed Amanda's little sis that day. Jumping into her inflated baby pool with her then shooing her out.

If my memory serves me, this was taken at The Curve during Chinese New Year, hence the cherry blossoms in the background.

OooOo. I remember Amanda spent the whole morning before the outing experimenting on my hair with her new heat curlers. And look, already half of the curls had straightened out. LoL.

Hey, I didn't know we wearing the same blouse! Or was it just the play of light?

Graduation day! One of the only days we could bring our cameras to school legally.

Me loves this pic (:

Our faces were so pink!

Ahaha. Joshua Bell. The only international 'celebrity' (at least in the Classical Music world) we succeeded in taking a photo with.

I miss you so mucho, babe. It ain't no fun drooling over books alone.

P.S. Now you know why I adored 2a1 immensely. As far as high school is concerned, Form 1 is merely a dark splotch, like someone had poured ink over that memory.