Short life

One day I know deep down in the marrow of my bones. I’ll be gunned down. Lately I have been having the same reoccurring dream again. That one.

I am all alone dinning in a restaurant, sitting with my back against the wall in my favorite table. A man walks in. I know him the moment our eyes lock. He’s the man who will take me to the other side. I don’t necessarily resent him or even feel the need to run or fight back – it’s not resignation and even less of acceptance.

It is maybe the pathos of something giving in to a greater force….inevitability. Maybe – like the very moment when a river suddenly slows down to crawl as soon as it discovers the infinity of the ocean after so many days and months of perpetual motion….so many days, weeks and months of tumbling across rapids and rocks as it makes it’s way frantically to this mythical point where the river and sea meets…only to lose all of itself in one act of supplication – now there is nothing to do except see it to it’s end….to embrace nothingness itself…I lean back into my chair, straighten my bush jacket and look up with that bitter sweet expression as the assassin levels his gun with the final words, ‘don’t mess it up.’

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‘Come the end of this September, it will mark my seven years away from Singapore. In the first few years I wanted desperately to return home. But due to family complications – it was really quite impossible.

I must have pushed the idea (of returning home) to one distant corner of my head. Either that or it was simply too painful to keep on thinking about it that I simply ran as fast as my legs could take me. It’s easy. As I had a helluva amount of work before me and work is really like a sinkhole. It just sucks up everything and much more leaving very little else. As the years past, that call to return waned into a murmur and soon I could hardly feel the pull of home any longer. I was like an astronaut who had spent an eternity in the vacuum of space and weightlessness became the only way to live. As for gravity. It was of course there..somewhere in the folds of my memory….but like the orb called planet earth, it was always just another distant place. Besides I had learnt to live without it and you could even say this is the only life I had ever known….I guess for some people when they return home – they would like to eat stuff they only imagine when they are away from home or visit places that they were once fond of or touch base with their old friends.

It’s a way of connecting with the familiar. A sort of touchstone that brings it all back.

As for me my needs are spectacularly simple.

All I want to do is go to a park and sit on one of the benches. I don’t have to do anything. Not at all. I could just be breathing and I reckon I would be quite happy.

I know it sounds crazy, but that’s really all I want to do when I finally make my way back home….one day…one fine day, that is.’