Of Durian Coffee

Just few more sips and I am close to heaven. I told myself while drawing the warm mug of Durian Coffee to my lips. I was with KHV in Likha Diwa and that very event sent a tremor, created a ripple in my intellectual spacetime. After a year, I got to see KHV again. After four years, it’s good to feel this kind of disturbance again in my prosaic spacetime.

Few hours before we had that coffee klatsch, it took me 18 missed calls, 3 text messages and 3 rounds of the area before I could find KHV’s boarding house in KNL. That day I made sure that I could meet him. It had been a year since he went back to Davao for LOA and it had been almost four years that we hadn’t talked about our ideas and perceptions on various topics. Oh! I missed the days of our youthful idealisms!

I had to see him. If not, I would miss the chance of bringing back my ardor for scientific discussions. I would miss the opportunity to remind myself that I am, somehow, a man of science and mathematics. If this happened, I might be insane by now. I am already bored with the usual things in life and I need to find my old self somewhere in the deep recesses of my memory and only one man can do that and that’s KHV.

He is Feynman for me.

We met four years ago in Molave Residence Hall. It all started with a stick of cigarette and some chit chat about smoking. I never expected that that simple chit chat would become daily intellectual discussions, exchange of physics and philosophical ideas, sharing of happy moments, green jokes, and some other things two close friends would do.

Upon seeing each other, we exchanged short lines of “how are you? and how’s your life?” He did not change much. He is still the same KHV I met four years ago. We did not talk much about ourselves. I, on one hand, told him about my future plans, my drastic change of priorities and the inevitable course of my choices.

Out of nowhere, our talk shifted to more deeper and technical. It seemed that we sailed on the sea of science, surfing through different waves of topics: from the usual exploration of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement and quantum equations; to the life of different physicists, particularly Richard Feynman; to the emerging fields of mathematics and physics such as Neural Networks, Statistical Mechanics, BioPhysics, Cosmology, Information Technology, Category Theory, Condensed Matter, and many other bizarre world of equations and phenomena; to philosophical understanding from reductionist point of view to non-reductionist, to works of Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky; to the personalities of our friends, the never dying idealism and activism of Midz, to the ever jovial disposition of Aldrin; and lastly to the future of our lives.

In just three hours we were able to talk on a bulk of the topics encompassing a wide range of time frame. This is the kind of discussion I missed.

After sipping the last drop of my Durian Coffee, I felt the tingling soul of contentment within me. At last, I have the courage now to reconnect again to all of my friends. I am ready to face things. KHV, supported me with my decisions and I believe that he believes I can do more from what I have now. I could sense his support and that empowered me to look at the brighter side of life. I know, I have been living a life with full of regrets lately. The more I think about the opportunities I let to slip away from my hands, the more that I am trapped within my day dreams. Hopefully, this chit chat with him will spark a new hope in my heart, a new life.