Being Human

A little insight on appreciation and the consequences of being home after 8 years abroad.

In Singapore, summer was the only season I knew.

The hot, humid fragment of the year that endowed suffocating heat as I stood impatiently by the train tracks was at one point of my life all I ever knew.

That’s why my first trip to Japan in December 2007 felt so surreal. My feet didn’t recognize the crunch beneath it. My hands didn’t recognize the numb and sporadically painful poke of sparks when it brushed against metal bars. My eyes definitely did not recognize the sight of white. The sight of white fields, white streaks toasting in the glare of the early morning sun, white specks caressing my mum’s eyelashes, white showers.

It was an unfamiliar beauty. Like a cold, distant friend who resisted touch and chose to lock herself in a closet rather than reveal herself to others. It was hard to reach out, but eventually I did for I was most mesmerized with its thorn-like texture.

Later did I know that life was such that adaptation is a most painful, cruel way of throwing away your 5 senses and living blank minded. The move to Shanghai slowly got me indifferent to the cool weather and soon the hour long bus ride to and fro from school became a waste of time.

Too car sick to read, too tired to memorize the pattern of the roads beyond the window, my bus rides became sleep sessions, an hour self-therapy session to pay off my sleep debt. And that is life sometimes I suppose, getting so caught up in whatever you’re doing you forget that change of heart, that excitement, tingle in your chest and your throat when you go off to a new space. I am afraid that I’ll fall off the edge like that, forget about all the things that make me human. That’s why I write I suppose, that’s why I think twice, feel, breathe my surroundings.

Author's Note

Please spill your thoughts by all means guys! I know this piece is quite raw right now but I want to work with what I have here.