The only times I’ve been able to travel is with my family. Being raised by an extremely cautionary father and a conservative mother, I was never allowed to travel by myself. When I had school trips overseas, I had to sit out. You can only imagine my frustrations and resentment watching people go while I stay.
Every time I bring up the topic of travelling, my dad gets sensitive and he would snap, going on and on about how it’s unsafe which I do believe, but nowhere in the world is safe, in some places not even your own home. However, according to my dad, the safest place I’ll be is with him or our home that he has built for us.
He would go on telling me how naive and innocent I am which will in turn get me cheated and taken advantage of. He would see how I lost (or almost lose) stuff overseas, like how I left my expensive jacket in the bathroom in Haneda airport or how I left my camera in the changing room of a clothing shop in Shanghai. He would see how my mood got affected seeing men dragging themselves along the floor in Shanghai’s subways, totally not knowing they are part of a criminal organisation. My whole being was shaken and my heart hurt. He would see how I lay on a tatami mat in Japan in the winter, our hotel room bright but the light outside growing dimmer, the heater not yet warming up and how I cried for no reason at all other than melancholy. ‘You’re on a trip to Japan with your family, why are you crying?’
You would think how would a person with my kind of heart and mind be able to travel? Absent-minded, naive, lost, kind, innocent, delusional with the belief that everyone is good, that nothing bad will happen to me. I understand him but my soul seeks to get lost somewhere on the other side of the world. I wonder if anyone understands how my mind drifts everyday to places that I’ve never been, people I’m not. My mind goes somewhere else and it takes a lot of strength to come back to this physical being.
I had a dream recently where I travelled by myself all the way to the other end of the country. I’m not sure if it was Singapore but I was incredibly far from home and the country seemed endless for a person like me. The light was dim with hues of purple and blue. The waves crashing below me, bars lighting up. I had no idea where I was but that’s the charm of it. I was so lonely but it’s the state that that my soul craves to settle in. I didn’t need company nor did I want it, I just wanted to exist in the state between life and death. Leaning against the railing, breathing in the sea salt air, barely any light at all, nobody knowing who I am.
It’s like I’m a transient being, neither here nor there, floating through parts of the world. As if someone plucked a tender drifter soul and stuck it in this female body in a small city nation, born to conservative parents to teach her what its like to remain and to stay. That soul would lament about how it’s going crazy in its dark and cold home, going crazy in this small island with nothing to inspire it and people would say through gritted teeth ‘no it’s just you.’