A reluctant update
It’s been a week since I arrived in Singapore. To summarize the past week in a single word, I would pick ‘awful’. But even that isn’t descriptive enough.
It’s been a nightmare. A living nightmare. I might as well have been some barely starving African kid who has been to New York and back. My surroundings are surely familiar - but it brings not warmth, but terror. A constant terror. Only within my room, my sanctuary, and a few places where the feeling of home lingers (like a certain bookshop) am I able to find peace. And even the peace I find is a lonely one. I may have escaped the tempest, only to find myself in a whirlpool. Something like that.
Perhaps what I fear above all is loneliness. I’m starting to hate eating alone in Singapore. Being in a hateful land is bad enough by itself - to dine alone is but a form of nearly-daily torture. Even in sleep I find no peace. Yet really, nothing seems worth staying awake for.
Nonetheless, I have sat for two exams since my arrival. One’s the EJU on Sunday. Another’s the BJT today. Both exams are not to be sniffed at, but really, I could have cried with relief when I was doing the papers. That reading a script that requires onerous effort and full attention could be so comfortingly familiar was something I don’t think I ever realized before. That listening to perfect-pitch prerecorded voices talking about stunningly boring topics can be so soothing is something that defies belief again. Indeed, I wonder why I am writing in English, when the words that arise in my mind aren’t in English.
I fear looking at the photographs I have taken. I fear that just looking at them would break my mind. I fear losing my mind, even. Tomorrow’s the start of the Common Test, and yet I cannot convince myself that it is something worth working for. Why should I work for it? It’s a school exam in English. How’s it going to impact my life one way or the other? Would anyone I need to care about it care? What can I gain through the exam? All naughts. Yet the thick red book lying just two meters away, as irrelevant as it is to my career at present, beckons to me softly. So do the fifty or so mostly A5 sized books downstairs.
Every trip to heaven implies there’s a hell waiting. And I am no longer able to tell if this hell is imposed upon me, or if it is merely unpleasantness amplified by my unforgiving and suffering mind.