Soon, I will be home, and won’t I be happier for it?

Photo: A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie by Albert Bierstadt

Notes from a journal entry. The words below were edited for clarity.

One glass of champagne in and the words flow uninhibited. If you’d asked me what kind of a drinker I was in my 20s, I would have said I was unflappable. In my 30s, I proudly claim the word cheap. It takes me half a glass to feel happy. One glass to feel sleepy and happy. Anything more than that and I feel sick. Sick not just the next day but sick the moment I go past my new body’s threshold - itching skin, burning ears, clogged nose, a low grade headache that becomes a very high grade headache that takes two days to settle. I spent much of 20s completely ignoring my body’s protests. I used my mind to control my body, my ego so bulbous that I thought my body would just take all of it lying down. In my 30s, I know better. The body always keeps the score. So, now I listen to its cues. When it says it has had enough, I tell my mind to willingly give in. Often begrudgingly, because if you know me, you know I don’t give in, or give up, easily. Time has also taught me that there is a universe of difference between those two terms. These days, I’m better at giving in. I’m still not great at giving up.

So, where am I having this one flute of champagne, you ask. In the flight, of course. I have a window seat, and it is storming outside. I am in Doha, and I have never seen a storm in Doha in all the years I’ve flown through this country. The lightning is flickering constantly, and somehow, I can hear the thunder despite the whirring of the airplane’s engines. When the lightning flickers, the flash of white lights up my window pane and I see raindrops slushing down my little cubby window. Water in the Middle East. It sounds like magic. It sounds like Mother Nature’s hysterical laugh. It sounds like a moment to be deeply present and alive. Naturally, sitting in the dark, one champagne down, it makes me want to cry. 

I get hugely emotional in flights. When I mean hugely, I mean, I always have one massive crying fit - big salty tears, muffled sobs, snot leaking out of my nose, sometimes hiccups. Different things trigger these crying fits. Memories of the past. Gratitude. The anxiety of being suspended in time and space, which is essentially what flying from one place to another really is. The utter ephemeral nature of my existence. The utter meaningless of it all. The beauty of seeing the clouds in the vast sky. Sometimes when I’m really lucky, I think I see stars and I feel like I am dancing barefoot in this galaxy, a wild peacock dance in the rain. But I always cry without fail. Sometimes for long, sometimes not so. But always. 

I spent most of my 20s running away from my reality. Now I can say this without batting an eyelid, without couching it in some sort of nicety, without pretense. Oh, how I resented my life. Resented the fact that I had to return to Singapore. Hated how bone-deep lonely I felt; that I had given my heart away, by that point, twice, only to have it returned to me in shambles. Couldn’t bear it that I had no idea what the hell I was doing with myself. Hated that I looked the way I did, too big, too brown, too curly, too much. Despaired that I didn’t have my friends near me - the friends who I felt safe with, who helped me from losing too much of myself. Resentment, despair, hate. It took me a decade to work through all of that, but during that time, I ran away. A lot. 

I spent most of my 20s alone and travelling. In flights, in airports, chasing one adventure, then another. It was only when I was sitting in an airport terminal that I felt I could breathe. Even then, my body was leading the charge, though I often didn’t realise this. I would feel my jaw unlock. I would almost always fall sick as I was leaving Singapore, an indication that my body, after clenching hard for too long, was releasing. I would find myself having a spring in my step wherever I was, even when I was alone. I would spend hours just sitting and writing, watching the world go by. My presence was diminished to its most infinitesimally small self and yet, I felt light, free, unburdened. When I was getting to the airport to return to Singapore, I would feel my familiar friend return, the anxiety that always chattered like a sparrow in my ear. My shoulders would tense, there would be a tick in my jaw. I didn’t understand what any of the physical stuff meant, but I did recognise the leaden feeling in my legs and the preemptive exhaustion that would settle over me like a fine layer of dust in an old mansion. It was only later that I could name it clearly - dread. 

I was such a sad, little, lonely girl. I don’t say this with sorrow or pity, my 20-year-old self deserves neither. She did things that paved the way for me to have a better, nay, different, handle on my 30s. But boy did she struggle. She did a lot of things, some good, some downright stupid, but she did the work. Even then, she didn’t stop doing the work. She was a lot more brash about it, running roughshod into the tangle of thorns  of her trauma and then screaming in pain; running back in again without letting the wounds heal. She wanted so desperately to be done with the healing, to be done with the work. Even then, at that point, she had felt she had been going at it for too long. But even when she wanted to give up, she did the work. She didn’t shy away from the pain. I say this now, proudly, because boy, did she also have no idea what was in store for her. She did some things right, because she cleaned up some wounds in a way that allowed love in. Love from a man, something she never thought she deserved. Love from herself, which she was never really taught to offer. Love from her friends, which she had always been blessed with but which ripened and sweetened with time. She let love in. The love helped heal some of the wounds. 

And that, that’s when I think the running stopped. 

I’m in a plane and heading back home as I write this. Even now, the word home remains complicated - at least, this place which is my current home, the place of my birth, the place of my blossoming, the place I spent a decade running away from. I have been looking forward to returning home about a week after I left; to be able to sleep in my own bed, to be with my family, to get back into my precious routine that keeps my mind and body going, to see my friends, to complain about the heat and the people and the prices and the what-have-yous. In the plane today, I feel the familiar low grade anxiety of returning to a busy life but I also feel the butterfly wings of joy, fluttering somewhere deep in my belly, feather light. Joy to be returning to something, returning to people who have missed me being away, returning to the safety that I have constructed with my husband in our little home.

Because home is a place and home is a feeling. I suppose I spent all those years running away because I felt unsafe, like I didn’t really know whether there was a corner of this earth where I could curl up and go to sleep knowing that someone would watch the door for once, take care of things while I rested. It’s different now. I rest easier. I let people watch the door for me. I lean into the love around me and receive. I feel safe in it and it nourishes me. 

I am currently flying in a storm cloud as I write this. Each burst of lightning feels like God writing his will upon my existence, the light is so bright it hurts my eye and the plane is lurching and jerking as it moves through the unbridled power of nature. I feel no fear, because I know I am exactly where I need to be right now - in the middle of the storm cloud, peeling back the layers of hardened skin around my heart and letting them languish on this page.

Soon, I will be home, and won’t I be happier for it?