Hello again to the real world! Sorry I have been missing for so long, but I'm sure we're all used to the fact that I tend to do disappearing acts these days. I wonder if it's something that comes with age and experience, but secretly I know it is a side effect of apathy.

Anyway, another season on the ice is now done and dusted. The way each day melts into each week into each month doesn't surprise me anymore. It didn't seem that long ago when I said goodbye to the world as I knew it 8 months ago, but here we are, it is the first day of June and half of my 2011 is already gone.

So much has happened to me and around me from the time I left right up till now, and frankly, I don’t even know where to begin. Sometimes I think that it must be a good thing, because it must mean that I am so completely lost in living Life that keeping track of it has become something of an impossibility, but I know better than that. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I lost the knack of writing the way I feel. I used to be so good at it when all this first started.

Perhaps there is no exact moment, and is more probably a culmination of little moments and tiny events that has led to all this self-censoring that I am gagging myself with. I started wondering who would be reading my words, and then the wondering became worry, and I started worrying about what people would think when they read what I wrote, and what conclusions they would draw without giving me the benefit of defending my words for myself. However, all this self-censoring is becoming very tiresome and I am sick of it. It is also starting to become a burden on my throat, this inability to express in words how I really feel.

I lost something very dear to me when I was on the ice. It was the fruition of five years of anticipation, moments under moonlight, glasses of wine, laughter and gags, promises, smoke-filled dancefloors, running into the waves at Legian, endless roads and music you can feel pounding in your ribcage. All this, interlaced with heartache and sprinkled with tears. I am sorry I lost it but Life goes on. And as in keeping with the WTF-ness that is Life, I have now found something new, something that I know will supply me with just as much joy and adventure as before. Already, the opening credits of Robot Chicken are looping in my head and refuses to leave me in peace, and the copious amounts of alcohol is still placed very firmly in the picture, Alhamdullilah Praise be to God.

Such is Life. A quarter of a century and I’m still none the wiser. Talk soon! Missing all of you.