Being Back

I arrived with my Mum, the girls, and 50lbs x 8 luggages on the evening of 8 Dec 2025. During the entire 18 hour flight I ended up not watching anything for the first time. Instead I read a book (Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin) and read Manhwa on my phone.

Last week was spent getting over jetlag, and getting reoriented again. I realised weirdly that because I had only been away for 4 months this time, my shortest time in between visits in decades, it felt like I had never left to begin with at the end of Aug. However in between these few months I have also endured so much suffering and pain, that it felt absurd to realise that it really had only been a few months since I was last in Singapore. Yet all the same I felt like I had aged a decade in the interim. 

This week was getting the girls set up for a life in Singapore. We bought E's school uniforms on Monday, and I started both her and M on some Chinese classes. Meanwhile the Ikea furniture I ordered arrived and my Dad spent a lot of the week fixing most of it up (I helped when I could, but mostly I had to be with the girls and watching them). Next week we will move over to Mama's house, and my parent's home where I grew up will no longer be my base in Singapore. 

I've been listening to 3 songs by The Killers a fair amount lately. Not sure what that says about my state of mind. When You Were Young, Human, and All These Things I've Done play on and off intermittently in my head. In general I don't want to think too much, so I don't. I am actively aware that I am actively refusing to think, but I don't quite think I'm in a state of denial. When I met Ianthe and JH last week they talked about me perhaps being in a dissociative state, and maybe that's what I am in for now.

NYC Novels

I finished reading Saint Mazie by Jeni Attenberg earlier today, and am now starting Open City by Teju Cole. Coincidentally, both books are set in NYC. Open City even starts with a mention of Morningside Park and the Cathedral of St. John the Redeemer, places that were right by Columbia University, where I started my American life 11 years ago. I didn't know where life would take me then, and I can fully say I still don't know where life will take me now. 

It's been a difficult year, and this last third of the year has been excruciatingly painful and difficult. I am battered and will bear these scars for the rest of my life, but I am somehow still here on this plane of existence. I don't know why, but I am. For better or worse it also seems like my continued existence and well-being means a lot to the people around me, so I guess I have no choice but to continue to soldier on regardless of the pain, out of my love for them. But I am tired and weary, and feeling no less lost and afraid of the unpredictability of the future than I was 11 years ago.

May this year be the most difficult one in my life, because I don't think I can survive another one like it.