“We said we would meet every year,” Aina says. “At the time, we really believed everyone would come.”
Her secondary-school class in Malaysia had been close. Malay, Chinese and Indian classmates had spent years seeing one another almost every day—lessons, exams, canteen lunches, school events and all the small things that seemed ordinary then.
After graduation, their lives began moving in different directions.
Aina continued through pre-university and into a Malaysian university. Jia Wei entered a twinning programme before leaving for Australia. Another friend went to the UK. Kavitha enrolled in a local university college.
One classmate took a different path.
“He started working while some of us were still studying,” Aina says. “His family needed the help. We understood, but obviously he couldn’t just turn up whenever we planned something.”
They still had their group chat. They followed one another on Instagram and Facebook. Photos were on phones, Google Drive and various other places.
They were hardly disconnected.
But staying connected was not quite the same as still feeling like a class.
“The chat can be very active for three days, then quiet for three weeks,” Jia Wei says. “Then somebody sends an old school photo and suddenly everyone is talking again.”
The annual gathering became harder too.
One year someone was overseas. Another year there were exams. Someone had just started a new job. Sometimes a planned reunion became dinner with whoever happened to be available.
Nobody took it personally.
Life was simply happening.
Four more years
There is one date they still talk about: their ten-year reunion.
It is four years away.
“We joke about it quite a lot,” Kavitha says. “Who will be married, who will have children, who will still look the same. But I think everybody actually wants it to happen.”
When the group began using Clozeu, Aina did not see it as another place where everyone had to keep chatting.
“We already have enough places to talk,” she says.
What appealed to them was having somewhere for the group itself.
Their gatherings could become Events. Photos and videos from different classmates could come together there, even when not everyone could attend. The moments they wanted to keep could gradually become part of a Collection shared by the group.
“It’s nice because Instagram is really about each person’s life,” Aina says. “This feels more like the things that belong to us as a class.”
Some of them later started using Clozeu elsewhere too—with family, university friends or new groups they had become part of.
Their lives were getting bigger.
The old class did not need to compete with any of that.
“Of course we all have new friends now,” Kavitha says. “That doesn’t mean the old ones become less important.”
For Aina, that may be the point.
They are no longer the teenagers who once saw one another every morning.
They are students, graduates, workers, sons and daughters, friends in different cities and countries.
But four years from now, when someone finally sends the message saying, Ten years already—when are we meeting?, they will not have to start again from an old group chat and try to remember everything that happened in between.
Some of it will already be there.
Still theirs.