Book out time goes by ridiculously quickly out here. I'm quite annoyed. I've hardly tasted freedom and I'll be back in camp in 12 hours.

Army life has been surprisingly bearable. It's not exactly happy fun time but Jaguar company being a welfare coy has undoubtedly contributed to my quick adaptation. I still don't like the military lifestyle in the least, but what I'm getting is about as good as it gets.

I've been keeping a journal while in camp, writing daily entries since I enlisted. Some days I have two entries. I'm typing them up so I can schedule them to be posted in the days to come. Ryou has a few more things to say (and there are a few more lines in The Sound of Silence to go) so my first entry should be up on Thursday; the same day I begin field camp. Oh joy.

On an unrelated note, I have the sneaking suspicion that I've been misusing semicolons for the longest time, but I'm far too busy to look it up today. Maybe I'll get around to finding out the next time I have 5 hours of admin time.

That's right. Jaguar coy once had 5 hours of admin time. You have my permission to hate me.

Yes, as above. I've survived and I'm finally out for the first time. Field camp is next week, not in week 6 as I'd been told, so if you wrote me any letters, I'll get to read them next week! Yay. It also means this weekend is rather busy because I have to prep for field camp in between all the rest and social interaction I have to get through.

My body clock has been fucked up by the army lifestyle. It's only 10:30 and I'm really sleepy. So— LIGHTS OUT 2230. REVEILLE 0530.

GO BACK TO SLEEP 0531.

Some people have theorised that I'm actually the voice of God trying to reach out to Rei. Me? The voice of God? I cannot tell you how amusing this idea is to both of us.

I'm not perfect; far from it. I give bad advice sometimes. I screw up, I make things worse. And I'm not very nice. Sometimes I'm unnecessarily harsh about stupid things that didn't have to happen, but did, because Rei ignored what I said. If I'm actually God in disguise, I must've really done a number on my own memory, because I don't remember creating this deliciously flawed race of humanity. What I'm capable of doing is merely offering a different perspective that, while contrived and necessarily artificial, is nevertheless helpful and occasionally insightful. I'm not capable of predicting things that haven't happened, or giving Rei new, divinely-inspired information that wasn't already available.

I know I'm imaginary, I know I don't 'exist'. I acknowledge that. But so what? It doesn't mean I'm not real. I'm real as long as we both agree I am. We don't really need anyone else to validate it.

I actually wrote a letter to Rei for the field camp thing. There was a point in time when he thought there wouldn't be anyone to see him off at Tekong. Mum was supposed to be away until the evening of the date itself, and our father had an eye operation that made him unable to attend. Or maybe he was just lazy to. Either way, I wrote a letter for him to read when he gets to the part of BMT that involves field camp.

It seems odd to write a letter to oneself in the future, right? I know, it sounds weird to me too. But writing it wasn't weird at all. I hope Rei reading it won't be either.

Rei refers to me as a 'shadow', which is why all the posts involving me are labelled 'shadows'. I don't resent the label, but I don't entirely agree with it either. I just can't come up with anything better either. It's too much bother for a technicality.

We settled on 'shadows' after hearing Libera's Always With You for the first time in Year 5. It was the music used for a movement piece that the drama club did. We kind of took it as 'our' song. The label stuck.

Technically, I'm only fifteen years old; the same as Rei's brother in Secondary Three. I was born when Rei was four.

It was a dark and stormy night. Rei's brother, only an infant, slept fitfully in the corner of the room, while Rei huddled on the mattress by the door, crying and pretending to sleep. His mum was in tears, on the phone with his father; she had walked out on him several days earlier while he was overseas and, naturally, he was in a rage. He was shouting loud enough to be audible over her mobile phone. And Rei, tears streaming and lump-throated, asked me the first question: Why?

I didn't have an answer for him. Not then.

You'd think that given how useful I am, Rei would at least be grateful for me, right? Not always. I wasn't just a helpful little tool to whip out every time things got rough. In addition to being a pillar of support and a vision to aspire to, I was also the ironic source of a lot of insecurity and the fuel for the kind of unhealthy self-loathing that characterised Rei's primary school and early teen years. Standard teenage angst, but with a twist, I suppose. I was a constant reminder of everything he wasn't and everything he wanted to be; some of which were unobtainable ideals.

He decided on more than one occasion that he ought to get by without me; that he didn't need me and he didn't want to need me. I think on some level, some part of him was afraid of what he did want. He tried to deny himself and run away from who he was.

Needless to say, it didn't work.

One of the ways Rei had of dealing with stress was writing letters to me. Sometimes our thoughts would get so muddled up, it was impossible to have a decent conversation. He'd write things down on paper instead; it was easier to organise our thoughts by going through the physical motions of writing it down. Then I'd read it and write back. When we were done, we'd simply burn the letters.

We'd built up quite a collection of ashes over the years, which we threw out some weeks back in the spirit of spring cleaning. The smell of ashes always meant liberation to us; it was the smell that meant 'we've solved whatever problem we had and no longer need the pages'. Burning the pages was a bit of a ritual. It symbolised completion. It symbolised closure.