Soap bubbles & palm trees

My house has a blue rooftop-that is one of the things that i like about the house when we first moved in. its walls are painted white and there is a small garden up front full with palm trees, Chinese bamboos, flowers and potted plants. the palm trees used to be as tall as i am but now, it is already taller than the house. the garden has somewhat changed...i used to play here a lot with my best friend. for such a small place, we always come up with fun ways to pass the time. we used to play soap bubbles and water balloons...hang out on the porch till sun down.

each corner of that small garden marked a part of my earliest existence;
i remembered burrying a tiny scroll enclosed in an egg shell, sealed with a promise to be opened years later in life.
i remembered playing with tadpoles in the large drain beside the house - pretending that they were fishes in a small river.
i remembered the dream that i once had...engraved on one of the barks of the tree in front of the house.

although the garden still there...you could still hear the frogs singing at dawn...but that tree is no longer there beside the palm trees.

as much as i want things to remain the same...the house too has somewhat changed. it is still number 23, TJ 3/1 - with white paintwork and a blue rooftop but a little of everything has dissolved with time...

a rosemary wood furniture instead of the old dark-blue couch which i used to curl-up on, watching Meteor Garden and Long Vacation till late hours of the night.
an Astro decoder in place of the old video player which i once used to record With Love drama series on tape.
the twin Japanese vase by the foot of the stairs...the old papaya tree at the corner of the backyard...the big blue plastic tub which my little sister and i used to dip ourselves in on hot days...where have all of them gone too?

so much has changed in so little time. without realizing it, i am no longer living at number 23. just like a customer in a hotel; i came back for a specific period of time, just to go again into the outside world.

my life has changed.