Singapore closes her curtains

I tried dyeing my hair red recently, but it turns out my hair is too dark to colour without bleaching. Very little results to show for the stench of hair dye that has been tailing me for the past two days and the wake of bloodied and stained towels and pillowcases I have left behind. With a botched hair dye attempt, it was time to turn to other things to attempt to relieve this nagging urge to demarcate the end of a major chapter in my life.

I was walking along the road home where the national day light decorations were strung up and thought that with the lights for a change, the vibe was different. I thought about how I watched the NDP parade live stream, both times, for the first time in my life out of free will. That must count for something.

I went through all the letters and notes that people have left in my life before, be it graduation letters, pre-competition encouragements, or even Valentine’s Day pickup lines that have outlasted the sweet treats they came with. I miss all of these people, and wonder if they still remember passing the notes to me, and I wonder how many other people I have left notes with and forgot about. It made me very emotional, but nothing really did what I needed it to do – to help me bid goodbye to the life I have led up till now in Singapore. Perhaps that is why people always go for a drastic hairstyle change when breaking up or leaving some parts of themselves behind. It seems only appropriate to match the same gravity and poetic significance of such a closure with an equally significant and grave mistake.

On the eve of my flight to the US, the land of the free, the Great Unknown where visitors will never return the same, I mulled over how to best convey this unwillingness to leave behind people and memories. The past few paragraphs starting with “I” made me realise that this is also an obviously selfish topic to pursue, about how I choose to remember things and how I feel. If we are closing a chapter of our lives, surely it is understandable that in this book we are making a metaphor out of we are the main characters anyways, entitled to this degree of self-centeredness.

Maybe I should start with something less selfish then. Think about the people who have left a mark in my life so far. People who have given me those touching notes that I still treasure. People who might not have even left a word for me to keep on a corner of a page, but have been there nonetheless. Then I thought against it, because it would sound like one of those speeches where you take turns toasting each and every table seated and people always end up bored waiting for their turn amidst the roster of other people they don’t know or care about.

So maybe a short response would suffice: I miss everyone, not necessarily with the heart-wrenching grief of people I have become deeply entangled with, but I miss everyone enough to worry about losing them when I get too caught up with the new people I will meet. From Unity primary school teachers and friends I was too caught up being childishly emotional to appreciate, to the sheer volume of people from Nanyang through Hwachong that have multiplied like those biology/math questions about a bacterium that splits n times in a minute how many bacteria would be in the culture after 6 years of multiplication, to the life-changing group of friends colleagues superiors I met through Army. It’s like graduation, but on steroids.

Maybe I should start with my identity as a Singaporean then, since I am leaving behind my birth country. The problem is, I am quite stumped for answer when people ask me what food I will miss the most from Singapore, because I cannot imagine myself craving anything here when I grew up on home cooked meals, isolated from the heartland culture and hawker lifestyle. This was the first year I watched NDP parades on my own violation (something about the regular life is different?). I don’t know how to order drinks at a coffeeshop because the lack of a menu makes me nervous when I don’t know the differences in dialect. I am a pretty terrible Singaporean, by and large, and maybe my one redeeming feature is that I can sing most of the NDP songs with great enthusiasm.

So we return to the same self-centred thoughts as the way to cope with this departure. I woke up this morning feeling terrified of what is to come. Maybe things would feel better if I had more recent travel experiences to reassure myself that I can indeed survive by myself. I’m scared of leaving behind my family, loved ones, all things there for me. I’m scared of super long flights and missing my layover flight. Perhaps a huge part of my reluctance to leave can be explained by fear. That might not be accurate either because I feel like I’m letting go of too many things, too many people here. I don’t know. Nonetheless, I have to carry on, with or without my envisioned red hair, for Singapore is closing her curtains, and the next act must begin.