under the blanket

How homesick am I?

I seem to give the impression that I am desperately longing for home, but to be honest, that is just the easiest emotion to express. The other feelings I have over my impending departure are too mixed up to be sorted out and put into words other than "I dunno".

What I do know is that, despite missing my family, friends and food, I’m not utterly and totally homesick yet because I haven’t even watched the VCD of Eating Air I packed along with my packets of BeeBee to stave off any potential pangs.

[For those not in the know, Eating Air is a “motorcycle kungfu love story”. It is my ultimate favourite local movie, because it is so unabashedly Singaporean. That I used to party with the director, and may or may not have kissed one of the actors have absolutely nothing to do with it.]

There is, of course, the longing for all the familiar physical things -- cabs whenever you need them after a night out, hawker food at any hour, shops that open till 10 pm -- but there is also something more intangible. Something in Milan Kundera’s Ignorance springs to mind: “Nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don’t know what has become of you.”

When I first read that earlier this year, I thought I was hard-hearted and emotionally crippled, because it didn’t touch me at all. But as time went by, I realise that the pain of ignorance is the hardest to bear. Of not knowing what is going on. Of being in the dark about my friends’ lives. Or simply of not knowing which hawker centre my family went to for dinner the night before.

There have been times when I wondered if I’m frittering away my life here, while friends back home are buying property [some for the second time], getting married [some for the second time], having babies [some for the second time], and generally ticking off items on the Milestones Of Life checklist. In the meantime, what have I been doing? Taking a break from “real life” and tearing up that list.

I remember interviewing an actress who spent a year studying in London and had such a memorable time that, before she left, she got a dragonfly tattoo on the back of her hip [what is that part of the body called anyway?] so that she would never forget. My time here may not been that tattoo-worthy [is anything ever worthy of permanent decoration of the body?] but I doubt I’d ever forget it.

Sorry this has been one long rambling post, expressing run-of-the-mill thoughts that anyone who has spent some time away must have had at one point or another. But indulge me, this may be one of my last posts. I haven’t quite decided whether to continue when I get back. But in any case, I started this as a hundred days of countdown, and there are only six more days to go.