It is always the leaving that brings it all into perspective.

It’s so easy to say that the weather in Sydney is too changeable, my house too cold, my brother and his friends too noisy, my mom too naggy, the lack of coffee in the kitchen unacceptable. But then, looking out on the pink-purple-orange sunrise over Sydney Harbour as we crossed the bridge, my backpack and my suitcase in the boot once again and my dad behind the wheel to the airport, I didn’t want to close my eyes for fear I would miss another priceless moment.

Tasmania was beautiful. Having been once more transformed into a city girl by the always-on lights of London, it was eerily quiet at first; even capital city Hobart doesn’t really feel all that much bigger than York, and as we travelled into the mountains and the (comparative) wilderness I was suddenly struck by how rare, how amazing it was that this part of the world, not 2 hours’ flight from Sydney, had managed to remain so pristinely untouched. This was not some urban-generated landscape, this was genuine nature. And after all this time, there are still no better travel companions than my family.

Yesterday as I sat on the old familiar 174 and went by my old neighbourhood en route to Orchard, looking down the street where I grew up, at the condominium which now occupies the place I used to swim, the playground at Bouganvillea Park behind the old bus stop, I almost didn’t know what to feel. There was nostalgia in spades, there was an ache for what is irretrievably gone, there was a warmth and a deeply felt thankfulness for what hasn’t changed at all. My sister, summing up my thoughts, said to me later in the night that she wanted to go back to our house and our neighbourhood, but at the same time she didn’t want to, was almost afraid to, because she knew it’d be different.

Today, I took a walk down Orchard Road from ION to Plaza Singapura, and at least half of what I saw was completely unrecognisable. Change is inevitable, I know, change is to be embraced. But oh, the dizzying vertigo. And yet – I know that when I sit in the airport again on Wednesday morning, another boarding pass in my hand, I will be soaking it all in and wishing I didn’t have to leave, however unfamiliar to me this island now is. There are still the people. There are still the memories.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

exactly one year and two days ago, i moved to london with not a clue what my future would look like this time next year. how time goes by.

seven years ago, i was dinnering at suntec with the squad; i think we were at kenny rogers and i remember being surprised with a makeshift cake in the form of a corn muffin and a single large white candle (which i hung on to, i still have it somewhere) in place of the seventeen which would’ve been impractical.

five years ago i came to this country all prepared to spend my birthday alone – a far cry from the swensen’s firehouse sundaes and multiple dinners out of previous years – and the motley crew, whom i’d known barely a month, got me a chocolate cake from marks and sparks and made chicken curry in my Ingram B kitchen and gathered to watch the princess bride in my room after dinner.

the year after that was, of course, the year of the soopersekrit photo scrapbook project which thanks to a text gone astray i knew about all along; i can still so vividly recall standing in a doorway with ailin and jason and en qi like a beckett tableau as we all rather surrealistically instructed jason to go buy me a scrapbook from paperchase in a certain shade of purple. and then next year was the epic video – how could i forget?

my dad’s birthday and mine are nineteen days apart in october, so whenever i am back home on holiday, just before returning to england for the autumn, we always go out for a big family dinner to jointly celebrate. the japanese restaurants near home in sydney are amazing, we have had the birthday dinner in two different japanese restaurants for the past two years.

this year, now that i’m on my own and not doing anything special on my birthday for the first time i can remember, i don’t feel as horribly lonely as i thought i might; the memories from years past keep me warm in the lengthening nights, as does the knowledge from here and now that i am loved, that beautiful and worthwhile people out there think i am beautiful and worthwhile, that my friends and family are amazing, that i am going home soon, and that i could not be luckier.

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I keep putting off blogging because I keep wanting to redesign, and I have ideas and all and even a Photoshop mockup (done ages ago), but there is no time on weekdays and always so much to do during the weekends. Once I start full-time work, it will only go downhill. Looks like it’s tomorrow or never, but in the meantime… there’s still today, and these words of wisdom from Mr Neil Gaiman himself, which Wee Zi first drew to my attention earlier this year and which I never got round to posting…

Hello, Mr. Neil.
This is my question: You lived most of your life in the UK but now live in the United States, right? Which one do you consider to be your home? And for that matter, what do you think classifies as a ‘home’?

I find myself remembering the Richard Burton (the actor, not the Arabian Nights one) line about “Home is where the books are”. And by that token, home is the one in the US.

But truly, even now, when I go to the UK I think, I’m going home. And when I go, er, home, I think I’m going to America. Probably why I’ve never taken citizenship…

But at the end of the day, I think Home is something you make, not something you find. Something you’re always leaving, and somewhere you’re always looking for or returning to. It’s part of growing up, and not the best part.

- (from Neil’s blog)

As always, Neil totally nails it, better than I ever could even after years and years of struggling with my own words.

Recently, someone referred to the UK as my second home, in casual conversation; my immediate and instinctive response was that Sydney is my second home, and the UK just a place I’m passing through. It doesn’t really make any sense because I’ve spent most of the last five years in this country, and less than 6 months collectively in Sydney over the same period of time, and it gave me pause for thought. As for Singapore – I think I’ve spent even less time there than I have in Sydney, since 2004 at least, so why do I still think of it as my first home?

I think I’m a lot less emo and angsty about finding home now than I used to be (time will do that to you), but it doesn’t mean I don’t still think of it often, turn the question around in my mind, grapple with my lack of answers. And what Neil says here – it’s exactly how I feel about the UK, Singapore and Australia. When I fly to Singapore, I think, I’m going home. When I fly to Australia, I think, I’m going to my family. And when I fly here, to the one country where I actually have a residence (albeit rented) to call my own, and a semi-permanent correspondence address, I think… I’m going to England. Often, I think I’m going back to England, and that back is a pretty key word, but I never think I’m going home. I guess Neil is right (what am I saying? of course Neil is right. Neil is always right :P) that home is what we make, and home is what you’re looking for, what you want to return to. And I think a big part of my thinking of Singapore as home is that so much of who I am is based on my growing up there, and it represents, or is as close as a physical place can be to representing, the idea of a world I want to go back to. I know it’s not the same anymore and that it has changed, in many ways, so dramatically that it is no longer the world in my mind. But the idea of it, the memory of it -

(As for the books, let’s not even go into where mine are. I have no idea, in most cases, and this distresses me.)

To me, Sunday is and probably always will be Oldies Day. As a child, and all through my teenage years as well, Sunday was waking up to an old CD that my dad had put on the stereo downstairs. The music would waft through the house as I went about my morning, softly upstairs through the bathroom door, louder as I headed downstairs, accompanying me through breakfast and the Sunday colour comics at the big marble dining table. I hummed along to Donna Summer, The Osmonds, the Bee Gees and Billy Joel never knowing the first thing about any of them. It was all just Sunday music, the music of lazy days in and slow, languid, easy mornings.

I haven’t listened to oldies on a Sunday for many years now. Perhaps since I came here and my family moved. We no longer have an ancient JVC stereo in the living room. Sunday mornings at home in Sydney are now the sound of my brother’s cartoons on TV, or perhaps his breakdance music blaring from computer speakers, and sometimes both. And while I’d diligently ripped almost all my CDs before coming here, I hadn’t thought to rip any of my dad’s, so I’ve now got a hard disk full of modern music, instrumental soundtracks, the odd classical piece and a very limited selection of oldies.

This morning, in search of suitable background music to keep me company while I did chores, I plowed through the Shoutcast internet radio directory and put on an oldies station. Suddenly it was like I was a child again – boppy, syncopated ’80s beats filling the house. I couldn’t help a little hop, skip and twirl round the room to Tina Turner’s glorious, belting vocals. Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? Ah Sunday, Sunday – with the right soundtrack, what a revelation you have been to me all over again.

At the end of a wholly unproductive self-allocated 10-6 workday (which will now have to be extended, as I have been in one of those stupors where I’ve no energy to do anything but I’m not sleepy enough to nap… yes I tried!), during which I was meant to tackle a myriad of applications and preparations that should really have been done earlier, I procrastinate further by sorting out phone photos and find this little gem from Tuesday’s Thought of the Day at Stockwell station.

Some time ago, Steffy said something to me that’s been lingering in my mind for the past week: that if something is mine, I don’t have to try so hard to hold on to it. Perhaps the allure of the past lies in the 20/20 vision of hindsight, the fact that I know I had all that, and I want to go back to being sure, to being certain. And now I don’t know what I have – but then, I know that back then, I didn’t know what I had either.

I’ve been wondering (time-wastingly, as usual) if the process of making friends gets so exponentially harder as one gets older so as to disadvantage all the new people one meets (this disadvantage is two-way, so fair’s fair), as far as forming genuine, lasting, rock-solid friendships go. My old girlfriends are always going to be golden in my book simply because we’ve spent half our lives together and nobody I get to know now is going to be able to compete with that, not because they’re any less delightful or likeable (I’ve often felt a clicky-feeling with people that’s made me think we could’ve been really, really good friends had we met under different circumstances).

Let’s say the BBC is right and that there is a limit to how many truly close friends one person can have. The average circle of friends, according to the article, consists of an inner circle of 5 core people plus additional layer of 10 to form a central group, some of whom may be family members. The numbers apply pretty much accurately to me so I’m egotistically assuming that most people are about the same. Obviously, by the time you leave secondary and pre-university schooling, these 15 spots will probably be all filled up! Where does that leave the new people you meet for the rest of your life, which presumably will be several times the length of your early school years? Are they all destined to be stuck in the intermediate-outer circles even if you could have been legendary BFFs had you met earlier in your lives?

It sounds ridiculous to immediately condemn all future attempts at friendship as doomed right out of the door – and I have made some amazing friends and met some fantastic people in York and London who’ve become really important to me. Maybe in 10 years’ time, when I’ve had a decade to spend with new(er) friends, that feeling of mutual understanding and camaraderie will have grown to a comparable extent to that which I currently enjoy with old friends. A part of me thinks I’m probably overthinking all this and friendship is really not that complicated, you either get along with people or you don’t (and yeah I can see the straightforward appeal of that line of thought). Another part of me, though, feels like it really does get harder and harder now to form the kind of friendships so easily forged in childhood. I want to, I really do. But just as I bring the baggage of innumerable memories and experiences to every new acquaintance I make, so too does the other person, and I feel it; that uphill climb to scale those years, to really connect and get to know them inside out, starting right from the bottom of the mountain where old friends have had the headstart well before me.

Anyway, well… I don’t really think I have a neat, stunning conclusion or an answer (how humanities-like, right?) to end this meandering chain of thought. Just a lot of questions. And the constant reminder to myself that maybe some of what I want is mine already, just as it was back in school. Maybe I don’t have to try so hard to hang on to fledgling friendships formed here. Maybe I should just relax. These things just happen naturally most of the time, don’t they?

I know I’ve lapsed. I do have an excellent reason though, which is being completely internetless in Stratford-upon-Avon for two weeks, except when I was at work (and it really isn’t ideal to be blogging from work, is it?).

I’ve had a really good fortnight – and a really good 4.5 months of work experience, generally – but… I just have so, so many things on my plate now. I’ll post about it all some other time, I promise.

In the meantime, I am still blogathonning for a worthy cause, but have pushed it back to the last weekend in March instead because I am exhausted and will probably drop dead if I attempt it next week! I will send out an email to everyone soon. Keep your eyes peeled and donate if you haven’t. /blatant

(I wrote the stuff below while on the train back to London yesterday. It was very cathartic, and probably a bit incomprehensible, but hey.)

Some days I feel like I can do anything. Looking out the window now, with “God Knows” playing on my iPod and rolling Midlands countryside passing me by, I’m hit by this overwhelming feeling of loving it all – flocks of sheep, deserted stretches of road and railway track, quaint little rows of houses, wide green-brown acres of land, factories, industrial sites, bare trees, grey clouds with patches of blue peeking through – everything. It’s good to know travel hasn’t lost all its romance for me yet. And I feel, here in the heart of England with a suitcase and backpack next to me, that I have the world precariously perched in the palm of my hand. Fragile, yes, but there.

Some days I feel like I’ve done a lot in the past that I regret, and I regret not doing a lot of things too. Sometimes the guilt is still overpowering. I’m overcome by thoughts of what I should’ve said and done, by the choices that have passed me by, and I think, hey, I thought I was past all this sort of wistful hindsight, but I guess I’m not after all. Maybe I won’t ever be. I guess I would be losing quite a big part of myself if I ever truly became so.

I think I’m just hopping, kind of, from lilypad to lilypad right now, trying not to drown and looking for the next safe place to leap over to. It’s not really a lifestyle I’d want to lead in the long term, but for now (for now) there’s still something ever so slightly edge-of-your-seat about it all that gets my pulse racing a tiny bit quicker. We’ve just pulled into Bicester North and a big sign reads “Alight here for Bicester Village”. It reminds me that there’s a lot of the world I haven’t seen or experienced. I doubt I’ll ever find an occasion to alight at Bicester North and visit Bicester Village, but they’re there, aren’t they? These little pockets of the new and unfamiliar.

With my knuckling down and starting to look for a full time job, it feels a little like I’m coming to an end of sorts, the end of this period of wandering. I have to settle down, for a while at least. And I’m looking forward to having some certainty and stability (if a full time job ever comes). But I think I’ll miss the restless roaming, in a way.

it’s my own design
it’s my own remorse
help me to decide
help me make the most of freedom and of pleasure
nothing ever lasts forever
everybody wants to rule the world

I guess I have to keep looking forward, relentlessly forward, but there’s always going to be something sepia and magnetic about what’s past. And I think, maybe, I can live with that.

It’s been an oddly melancholy week, and I can’t put my finger on why. Have I – horrors – prematurely reached the plodding, weary phase of my dissertation, having spent the past few days mired in an excellently written but extremely long biography? (Next up, >1200 pages’ worth of letters… joy.) Is it the end-of-term syndrome, where everyone around is either done, very near done, or leaving for good already, and the thought of home and family just beckons so enticingly? Is it the ridiculously indecisive weather, which has been seesawing back and forth between lovely and abysmal with almost daily regularity? Is it my continued deficit of money and employment, and a frightening dearth of further prospects to apply to?

Actually, I suspect it isn’t really any of the above. I’m probably just trying to find excuses to justify the vague, moody miasma that’s been hanging round me lately… and more likely than not, it’s just one of those inexplicably emo things that will go away on its own with time.

The RJ lit trip made a stop at York last Wednesday, and I was very happily assigned to the campus tour group which had Mr Purvis in it :) And it dawned on me, really dawned on me, how much I have changed since I was the shy silent girl in the back of TS2. I found myself strangely able to have a real conversation with him where in the past I would have been too terrified to do anything other than nod and smile; we had a very thought-provoking chat about literature and life after university as we walked round the campus, and it might just be the very first time I’ve really understood the human side of this teacher who was such a prominent figure in my JC days. He told me about how he was glad I’d kept the faith with English, and that he really regrets not doing a Masters after getting his first degree – and how, now, thinking about it, he’s afraid he’s not good enough for an MA and that his BA was really a fluke.

Hearing that, just that one line, from someone who was almost singlehandedly responsible for igniting my obsession with lit and pushing me towards the path I’ve taken… it was heartbreaking. I felt there were so many things I wanted to say to him: I wanted to tell him he was good enough, that it wasn’t just luck, that he’s been inspirational not just to me but to a lot of other students, and how could someone like that be a fluke of the system?

But I couldn’t find the words. I struggled with what sounded, to my ears, like hollow reassurances; I don’t even remember what I said in the end. We moved on to talk about how beautiful the campus is in spring, my mind trailed off and I started wondering if I should tell them that the lake is really toxic, actually, and I forgot all about it for the moment.

Thinking back, I wish I could have said everything I was feeling. I wish I could have poured it out, I wish I could have found a way to show it. But there will never be a way, when words just aren’t enough, and it will always be one of those increasingly frequent instances where the empty signifiers of everyday language are just sorely, sorely inadequate to the occasion.

So today the bunch of us ex-Rafflesians met up with the lovely lady from the International Office to talk about and plan what we were going to do during the upcoming RJ visit to York. And along the way, she dropped the yummy nugget of information that the teacher coming with them would be Mr. Purvis. And my heart just – leapt.

Sure, last time it was Mr. McConnell who came, and he’d taught me for S-paper and he did remember me and it was nice chatting with him, but he did only teach me for a year at a once-a-week class where I was practically invisible because I was silent throughout… not that I talked very much during Purvis’s classes, but his lessons, his obvious love for literature, whatever little bits of conversation I had with him out of class – they were all such a big part of why I chose this subject in uni, how it finally dawned on me that lit was my thing, how I came to see it as so much more than a dry, analytical sifting through dusty old words.

I’m so bizarrely weirdly excited, and happy, that he’s coming to York. I don’t even know if he remembers me (it’s been ages and he probably doesn’t since I have been very remiss in visiting RJ – the new campus is so cold and distant), but… yeah. This is another blast from my past that really means a lot to me. I’m stoked. ♥