When the world caves in

Rain falls outside. It’s now long past bed and I’ve just put down the phone. Are there days you wish you were a different person? I do. I wish I could be the one, the right one. The one who matters, who makes a difference, who is loved. I wonder if I ask too much. Has there ever been a moment whereby you feel as if you’re being pulled inexorably apart? That your home is no longer a home and does not even have a place for you?

I find myself confronted with the reality that I no longer have a place to call my own in Singapore. That there is no place for me to return to when my travails in Perth are halted, even for the briefest of moments. Almost as if by that very realisation, I am cut adrift, a ship caught by the vagaries of the wind and seas, going thither with no port of call, or no anchor to cast, save to run aground. Even the brief hospitality that was offered me by Diane’s parents is now unable to be extended; although I doubt I would avail myself of it, even if that invitation were open. By that very fact, my return home would constitute another ‘migration’ of sorts. How strange to not have a home to call home. I suppose straddling two countries really does make it hard to call one place ‘home’, even if it is by circumstance and not choice.

I remember vividly the story of an English sailor, shipwrecked and marooned, slowly finding his way back to England to be with the woman he left behind, only to find that she had long since forgotten him and married another. I feel for that man, and some days I feel as if we share the same lot in life. Surely such fortitude must be somehow rewarded.

It’s difficult to put into words the kind of uncertainty which sometimes shakes my faith. Save that it does get shaken, and the indomitable will of Chris Kwok gets taken down another peg. Blind faith gets you nowhere. Sometimes you wonder whether despite all your faith, you are in fact, blind.

Have you wondered what life would be if certain things never happened? I wonder. Because at the end of that long and tedious preamble would be that question, “Does my life have any meaning to others”? And that is what we really want, is it? To feel appreciated, to know that your life has meaning, even if that meaning is validated by other persons.

It’s like the question of who would I be today if I never had my heart and spirit so utterly and completely crushed by Joanna that I needed the combined help of all my friends to even consider standing again? Who would I be if there was no Ang and Amelia and Poon to pick me up when I fell? Who would I be if I never came to Perth? Who would I be if I never got a job in Australia?

I don’t know. Probably a self-absorbed superficial immediate-gratification focused person like the many people I see everywhere I go. Even then I pass judgement even when I should not.