Sometimes time vanishes without a trace—like those nights of dreamless sleep when the clock leaps forward and we only meet ourselves again at morning. But I’ve never passed a night without a dream—and I don’t think most people do—so I couldn’t quite imagine what that absence feels like until a recent colonoscopy. I was sedated for about forty-five minutes and woke to a clean page: no dreams, no drift, just the next moment. The interval might have been a thousand years—or none at all. I had no sense that any time had passed. It was as if I’d stepped out of one moment and directly into the next.
It made me wonder what we mean by time when the mind is absent, and what we fear in death if there is nothing there to feel the fear. Epicurus said we never meet death; anesthesia seemed to stage a small demonstration. Our consciousness stitches time together; without the stitching, the fabric falls silent.
Not everyone’s sedation is serene, and beliefs differ. Still, I find a strange comfort in this thought: life as music, death as the rest between notes—silence that carries no weight. Have you ever opened your eyes and realized the gap had already let you go?
The identity of an object does not lie in its material, but in its form and purpose, which persist even through transformation. Thomas Hobbes
As I trace these fragments of myself—Margaret’s scarf in the wind, James’s quiet wisdom, Angel’s laughter dissolving into Pattaya’s sky, the long gone voices —I wonder: if identity is woven from transient moments and borrowed voices, what anchors us to a sense of self? It’s a question that echoes an ancient paradox: the Ship of Theseus. Imagine a vessel, plank by plank, replaced over time until nothing original remains. Is it still the same ship? Like my own life—cells renewing, memories softening, yet somehow I persist—the Ship whispers that identity isn’t in the pieces, but in the continuity of the journey. Likewise, I thread my different selves over the years with my memories to form a story with a plot ever evolving and characters ever coming and going .
So, let’s set sail into this puzzle, where philosophy meets the quiet truth of our multi-faceted lives.
The sun is setting, and I sit by a window, watching the last glow of day slip into dusk before surrendering to night. On the warm October breeze, childhood finds me again. Then the mid-autumn moon is ascending to the sky – silvering the sill and the glass. Fifty-seven years ago, a ten-year-old boy would stand at this same window, gazing at distant rolling hills and a small crescent harbour with ferries gliding across it—until my mother’s dialect interrupted: “Silly Billy, if you keep arsing around there like a statue, you can kiss your supper goodbye !”
Not without hesitation, I left the window for the brown-lacquered table where the four of us would gather under the amber glow of the wall lamp, while moonlight kept a low, silver calm on the floor. For the next ten years, until my father passed away, that table and lamp would serve the heart of our home—a steady anchor in the currents of time. Now, with all the changes life has brought, the breeze ruffling my hair feels like a thread connecting me to those evenings, to the version of myself that once stood at that window beneath a full bright moon like the one tonight.
Those people I’ve met, the places I’ve been, and the moments I’ve lived through. Where are they now—the friends, the family who shaped my life, and even those whose paths crossed mine for only a moment? Time has scattered them like leaves in the wind, yet somehow, they are all still here. They’ve melted together into the essence of who I am. And so I wonder: am I truly just “me”? Or am I an amalgamation of everyone and everything I have ever known?
Now the thread is frayed; the spool unwinds. Still, I must gather, must tell these stories though the telling will never be complete.
Margaret once told me she would come back. “I’ll meet you under the banyan tree by the river,” she said as we walked along the Shing Mun River, her scarf slipping from her shoulder as the wind caught it. I waited. I waited as the shadows grew long and the October air turned chilly; the moon, pale and patient, lifted above the hills. But she never came. Or perhaps she did—years later, as another voice, another face, another moment. Now, almost forty years on, the thoughts of her no longer stir my heart. Yet she still appears in my dreams, sometimes solid, sometimes just faintly recognizable, still in her twenties as when I last saw her.
And then there was James, always catching fragments of life’s deeper truths in his laconic way. “If that’s how you find meaning, Bart, then by all means do so,” he said in his customary matter-of-fact tone that somehow felt warm. I remember the day I told him, in our regular restaurant, that I’d move out of the flat, seeking a new way of life. “Do come back whenever you want to,” he said softly. Simple words. No flourishes. They were drowned in the din of the restaurant. I hurried home to try to scribble down our conversation, but the words on the page felt hollow, unable to capture the muted passion beneath them. So I gave up. Yet his words stayed with me, resonating in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time. The other day when I stood on Shau Kei Wan Road on my way to the MTR station, as faces blurred past and the city pressed in, I thought of him. His words are mine now, his warmth too.
The self is not mine alone. It is theirs—Margaret’s, James’s. And there are voices I cannot place, voices whose origins are blurred by time. “Listen, Bart,” one of them says, as if from a dream I’ve long forgotten. Their face is a flicker of firelight; their name lost in the mist of memory. Perhaps it was a classmate, speaking late at night in a tent we pitched on Pui O Beach on our matriculation graduation day, our words dissolving into the whisper of waves and the hush of a moonlit tide. Or perhaps it was no one at all, just a fragment I created to make sense of myself. “It’s all here and now,” the voice says. “We’re the stories. This is what we are—stories pressed together, layered, overlapping.” At the time, my younger self dismissed our stories as plain– if indeed the stories they are, I thought. But as the years unfolded with their twists and turns, I began to wonder if they were right. For what am I if not a tale told by those I’ve known?
And yet I am not merely the narrator of my own story. I live in theirs too though I cannot know what remains of me in their memories. I think of Angel, her laughter startling birds into flight as we walked in Pattaya. “You can’t catch them, Bart,” she teased, as I ran after the flock. But isn’t that what I was doing? What I have always done? Chasing the fleeting, the ephemeral, trying to hold what cannot be held. Now cupping moonlight in my hands, but with it slipping through my fingers, I find myself thinking how my life has navigated its twists and turns.
Angel’s faith in God is unshakable. “When will you ever believe in Him?” she asked once. “I can’t imagine how I would be in God’s presence one day without you.” I envied her eternal vision, even though I balked at it. I told Bill Crewe. He teased me: “You’re denying yourself the chance to hear her lyre in the Divine Kingdom.” Such a cynic as he always is. I stayed silent. Instead, I walked through Jardim de Flores in Taipa, where the autumn lotuses, wilted and fading, seemed to embody both death and beauty.
Now the memories rise unbidden, their edges softened, their colours fading. The self is not fixed. It is not merely the stories of James, or Angel, or Margaret, or that voice I half remember. It is all of them, all of me, folded together, inseparable. Each moment, each face, each voice enters the cauldron, distinct at first—sharp, vivid, whole. But time stirs, and they dissolve, blending, becoming essence, as moonlight dissolves the edges of things until only their contous remain.
And still, there are flashes—moments when they return. James’s brevity of words at dusk (with him, I thought of Lydia. With him, I thought of Angelina. I hold them in a triad). The faint murmur of a camp as evening light fades. Angel’s vision of eternity. Margaret’s scarf, caught in the wind. They are not gone; they cannot be gone. They are here, in the way I pause to think of them, in the words I choose, in the life I live—in the quiet, lunar hours when the city softens and the mind listens.
Now the fire burns low. The pot simmers quietly. Outside, the moon is high, patient as a witness. The voices soften, merging into one. And still, I must tell. For this is what we are—not solitary beings, but mosaics, composites, each of us carrying the others within us, bright and dim as phases of a shared moon.
The thread is nearly gone now, the spool almost empty. Still, I must gather, must weave. For when I, too, dissolve—when I, too, melt into the whole—perhaps my voice will remain, soft but steady, in the cauldron where we all meet, where we all become one, as the tide answers the moon.
I’ll be honest: I hovered over the “publish” button for way too long, wondering if anyone would read what I wrote—and if it would even matter. But as I watched the words land on the screen, something shifted. Maybe it isn’t about who reads it. Maybe it’s about finding my voice—one that can tell my stories, articulate my ideas, and say what I actually think.
Writing is funny that way. It starts out as this quiet, private thing—just you and the blank page—but there’s always a little hope tucked inside that someone out there will hear you. It can feel lonely, dropping words into the silence. But underneath that loneliness is a simple wish: to connect, to reach across the gap between me and you. And somewhere in that process, reflection turns into self-expression.
It’s also a way of pushing back against impermanence. When we put our experiences, our stories, and ideas into words, we anchor them against flux. Even if those words only reach one person—or even just our future selves—they become a voice that endures.
And now, with blogging, we get to do this through self- publishing without waiting for permission. No gatekeepers, no middlemen—just our words, as they are, added to the expanding constellation of voices out there. Who knows? Maybe something I write will be a small light at the edge of someone’s horizon—a glow they didn’t know they were looking for until they found it.
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