Charmaine went back to her secondary school for a little AEP gathering. The crew they managed to assembly was motley, long-lost, but not unexpected. The teachers were delighted. Seeing them again renewed her conviction in several things.

Firstly, the teachers were really something special: remembering every single thing about them short of their identification numbers. From height, to bustline, to waistline, to hair, to skin colour, to interests, to abilities, to idiosyncracies, to things they (individually) did right, wrong and didn't do.

The conversations were light, and of the past, present and future, leaving participants a little confused about which point in time they were at. But the way things went, time might just as well have been a saturated, unmoving medium, as the teachers set them Homework, discussed our old and new projects, and transferred their juvenile artworks back into their possession as if they left them there only yesterday. The teachers didn't treat them any different, raising eyebrows of disbelief when they counted the years together and realized that the students were now 18, now adult and legal. The man teacher laughed at them, took out his camera and snapped photos for the present. Just as if the photographs could be pulled out the next day to be analyzed for colour, lighting and composition. Pictures, not memories. Pictures that become memories without ever intending to.

Second, it took that many years (four!) for Charmaine to realize that underneath the caustic jokes that the woman teacher sometimes made, perhaps undercurrents of true disparage did exist. That made it difficult, or even more difficult (she already knew it was) for Charmaine to like her. Because like everybody else, her willingness to enjoy someone's company heavily depended on how much the person truly liked her.

Charmaine begins to wonder what "warmth" and "nostalgia" really means, and if they mean merely a feeling that the past is fits that certain hole in you, even if out of habit rather that fit.