Twenty-five days
Twenty-five days
Twenty-five days, six hundred hours, thirty-six thousand minutes, is the amount of time that Eunhyuk takes to slip back into Singapore skin.
He knows it, when his raw skin does not scream in protest to the excruciating heat, but merely turns a crisp shade of walnut. Singlish comes easier to him, Hokkien curses when he feels particularly nasty. When he wakes, it is to rumbling thunder and grey skies at eight-thirty in the morning, his wifebeater clinging to his body, blanket long gone and kicked onto the floor.
It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain his international outlook on life, his wanderlust for travel and meeting individuals that he might never see again, but within ten minutes, have arms around each other as beer glasses clink.
Skin in black, yellow, white, brown, language jokes that fly over each others heads, and a common fondness for the strange Japanese culture, no longer exists in home base, where Eunhyuk is the culture that others now find strange.
A part of him misses it, misses being detached to his surrounding culture, finding exotic encounters around every mundane corner. For now, everything has fallen into accustomed ordinaries.
(Sungmin’s email sits in his inbox, an invite to Taiwan during fall, where tealeaf harvesting is abundant.)
But this is home, and in home he has to trudge along.
Twenty-five days, six hundred hours, thirty-six thousand minutes, is the amount of time that Eunhyuk takes to slip back into Singapore skin.
He knows it, when his raw skin does not scream in protest to the excruciating heat, but merely turns a crisp shade of walnut. Singlish comes easier to him, Hokkien curses when he feels particularly nasty. When he wakes, it is to rumbling thunder and grey skies at eight-thirty in the morning, his wifebeater clinging to his body, blanket long gone and kicked onto the floor.
It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain his international outlook on life, his wanderlust for travel and meeting individuals that he might never see again, but within ten minutes, have arms around each other as beer glasses clink.
Skin in black, yellow, white, brown, language jokes that fly over each others heads, and a common fondness for the strange Japanese culture, no longer exists in home base, where Eunhyuk is the culture that others now find strange.
A part of him misses it, misses being detached to his surrounding culture, finding exotic encounters around every mundane corner. For now, everything has fallen into accustomed ordinaries.
(Sungmin’s email sits in his inbox, an invite to Taiwan during fall, where tealeaf harvesting is abundant.)
But this is home, and in home he has to trudge along.