Summer Travels- Beginnings
I dread visiting my parents. Their house out in Newtown, Bucks County has too much space and is too quiet for a city boy. I need the electric jolt of the city with its noise and traffic of people to inspire me and although the ever present sirens sometimes infuriate me, I know I fear the sound of my own breathing even more.
However, here in the sunroom of my parent’s house overlooking the lily lined porches of suburbia, my thoughts begin to breathe in a different air. The running streams that merge and diverge in my head are allowed the space and time to run parallel and ripple through the room as I ponder on my journey ahead.
This time the return to Singapore will be different. It will not just simply be a trip to reconnect with friends and family, to visit old haunts and taste familiar dishes. It will be all that but also a little more. This trip back home I carry with me a certain anxiety that has seated itself at the center of my chest, a prickly tiny black ball that throbs with a dull ache and cannot be soothed no matter how much I try to rationalize it away.
I have spent the last four year s of my life building a new home in America and as I am about to graduate from college at the end of the year, I quickly approach another intersection in my life and am confronted with another choice, to stay or to go.
It is a question that is not only steeped in the concept of home and a sense of belonging but is also sharply punctuated by the reality of finding a job. As I exited from the sheltered life of academia, I join the many graduates who face an uncertain future and a harsh economic climate in the US.
The clarity I seek in journaling becomes clouded by the pain of my ties and connections in both countries as my thoughts ebbs and flows towards and away from me. The relationships that I have begun in America struggle against the ones that I have in Singapore. As the connections I have in America begin to deepen with time, I feel an erosion of the ones that I have at home. It seems that I am trying to build sandcastles on both shores, a futile and ever tiresome effort that fights against the waves of time.
These passages begin to tire me as I stem the flow of emotions that well up and threaten to burst forth. I will retire for now but persist in the search for answers that I have to confront myself with. For now, I take comfort in the simple pleasures of life, the admiration of the lilies that line the porch of my parent’s house. Their gently drooping heads blush a light purple in the morning sun as they sway in a gentle breeze, easy and carefree.
However, here in the sunroom of my parent’s house overlooking the lily lined porches of suburbia, my thoughts begin to breathe in a different air. The running streams that merge and diverge in my head are allowed the space and time to run parallel and ripple through the room as I ponder on my journey ahead.
This time the return to Singapore will be different. It will not just simply be a trip to reconnect with friends and family, to visit old haunts and taste familiar dishes. It will be all that but also a little more. This trip back home I carry with me a certain anxiety that has seated itself at the center of my chest, a prickly tiny black ball that throbs with a dull ache and cannot be soothed no matter how much I try to rationalize it away.
I have spent the last four year s of my life building a new home in America and as I am about to graduate from college at the end of the year, I quickly approach another intersection in my life and am confronted with another choice, to stay or to go.
It is a question that is not only steeped in the concept of home and a sense of belonging but is also sharply punctuated by the reality of finding a job. As I exited from the sheltered life of academia, I join the many graduates who face an uncertain future and a harsh economic climate in the US.
The clarity I seek in journaling becomes clouded by the pain of my ties and connections in both countries as my thoughts ebbs and flows towards and away from me. The relationships that I have begun in America struggle against the ones that I have in Singapore. As the connections I have in America begin to deepen with time, I feel an erosion of the ones that I have at home. It seems that I am trying to build sandcastles on both shores, a futile and ever tiresome effort that fights against the waves of time.
These passages begin to tire me as I stem the flow of emotions that well up and threaten to burst forth. I will retire for now but persist in the search for answers that I have to confront myself with. For now, I take comfort in the simple pleasures of life, the admiration of the lilies that line the porch of my parent’s house. Their gently drooping heads blush a light purple in the morning sun as they sway in a gentle breeze, easy and carefree.