Popagandhi

So this is it. I’m leaving. First to Dubai, various parts of the Middle East, Oman, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, wherever, then… wherever the wind takes me. There were a million things I wanted to say when I got here but I don’t know what good they’d do. Everyone’s used to me going away for weeks or months — I did that too much, but I always came home. That’s it. I always came home.. But this time?

I only know I have to go.

I’m not comfortable with being comfortable. Singapore, as you know, thrives on comfort. This country wouldn’t exist without it, and its people wouldn’t know how to live without it. The air-conditioned schools, buses, malls, air-conditioned everything. The well-manicured city. What little control we seem to have over our lives and fortunes, in a life that was planned out in steps for you, that could be yours for the taking, if you so desired. It terrifies me and for as long as I can remember I have wanted nothing more in life than to do the things that scare me the most. Because I can. Because I choose to. I’d rather be wrong and know I chose to be, than be right and comfortable and not because of my choices.

I love my friends, I love being home, the wonderful family that I have. But if I’m not throwing myself into uncharted territory or crowded buses to nowhere, I don’t know what I am. It’s a big world out there, so how can one possibly be happy with 699 square kilometres of it?

Last night in Haji Lane, close to 40 people I most wanted to see before I go showed up at Going Om to send me off and to celebrate my 23rd birthday.

It didn’t hit me until last night that I was leaving. I’d been so busy with life, love, career, with being everywhere but here, that I don’t think it even once entered my thick skull.

Until my best friends sat there making toasts, giving the world the low-down on the most embarrassing bits of my life circa 17-21.

Until 40 people I loved filled up that room and met each other for the first time.

Until I found the idea of going away semi-permanently jolts people into making peace: my ex outside, lecturing me about writing, life and love as she always does; other people who hadn’t spoken to me in years deciding this was as good a time as any to finally accept my apologies for having behaved terribly towards them, years ago.

Until I sat back and found that D., S. and I have come a long way from messing about skipping economics lectures and running away from Miss K, to being the best friends and beautiful people that they’ve been for the last six years. Through all kinds of drama — a lot of it.

Until I found myself comparing bank accounts to expedite the process of saving, spending and moving money across three countries, and staring intently at a mileage redemption map on Emirates.com, trying to figure out how best to accumulate miles to London, and found myself panicking. I’m turning… twenty three? What the fuck does that mean?

It means I’m fucking scared but that only makes me want to do it even more. It means I’m going to vacation in Yemen even if I need military escorts with machine guns to take me around the supposed capital of the Queen of Sheba.

It means I take with me the good luck to have known and loved all these wonderful people here, and I’d better start packing, even if I’m not taking very much with me.

29 hours, a lifetime, and the big, wondrous world out there.