Episode 363: Early Morning Musings...

I once thought to myself that it would only get easier. Leaving, how hard could it be after the first time? I managed to fool myself because the first time, I already had a ticket for a December return tucked away in cyberspace, and the second time, it was only going to be for six months. Now, with barely more than a week till the third time that I board an aeroplane to cross two continents, I realise that I was wrong. It doesn't get easier; it should get harder. The reason is entirely selfish, and betrays the sort of sentimentality that I am otherwise loathe to openly acknowledge: I resent having my life carved up like this, accumulating memories that practically belong to two different people. I have friends back at university whom I've known for less than a year, and I sometimes have more to say to them than to people that I grew up with. Yet these people are the ones who're going to still be waiting for me here, after the inevitable point comes when 'Goodbye' isn't followed by 'See you after summer' anymore, and the people I knew at university recede only as far as Facebook and my future salary and annual leave allow them to. It is this need to retune my feelings whenever I relocate that nags at me. Then there is that curious hybrid group, Singaporeans at Warwick, who evoke a completely different set of feelings altogether. Now if I were more disciplined, this is exactly the sort of psychological conflict that could be mined to significant literary effect. I am not so self-flagellating as to want to dissect my feelings by spinning work out of them. Much easier to get by with witty jibes, tongue firmly in cheek and the inaudible snap of words in the air. Far easier to just type it out here one night on the spur of the moment, so that all the subsequent days and nights can be lived with a lightness of heart and spirit.