No Solid Ground…

… It’s fake believe
All you can see
Is really there…

The French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m sitting here on my bed in the apartment I grew up in for the first time in about three years, finally home again after a graduation, a couple jobs, and a flight across the world. I’ve already fallen into a comfortable routine after a few hours of being home, spending most of my time with my family yet strangely apart and distant in my bedroom while everyone else is either in front of a television set or a computer screen.

And that’s the way it has been since I moved away, coming home only during breaks in the school year. My bedroom, which I used to share with my older sister, is now a repository for my brother’s books, cardboard boxes of unidentified possessions, and other odds and ends that don’t belong elsewhere in the house. My closet, which used to store what I used to think was style from the 80s and 90s (think stretchy light wash jeans, oversized shirts and throw in a Hellblazer t-shirt I stole from my brother), has now made space for my mother’s clothes. My sister’s old books and CDs that she never took with her to the United States when she left in 2001, still sit on their shelves. Many of the musty, dogeared titles seem to belong to a certain time that we’ve now passed.

And still, even though we don’t live here anymore, my mother keeps some of our stuffed animals around the room. Mousie (mouse), Fritzie (bear), Winnie (wombat) – we were really into naming our toys when we were kids – and assorted Winnie The Pooh plushes from a time when McDonald’s in Singapore was giving them out with Value Meals. My Tori Amos poster is still stuck to the wall with what must now be pretty ancient Blu-Tack. This scattered patchwork of my things and things that aren’t mine, grown-ups’ artifacts and stuffed animals as old as I am, just doesn’t make the room smell the way it used to when I was much littler.

In some ways, the nostalgia is nice. It’s fun to poke through old drawers – As a child I was intrigued by boxes and the top drawer of my side (the left side) of my sister and my shared desk holds three different boxes each containing little treasures from my childhood – buttons, pins, barrettes, old plastic earrings, and even a picture of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus – a relic from when I thought I might be Catholic.

Poking around, reading old notes, and flipping through old photographs make me realize how much has changed in the ten years I’ve left home. It seems almost unkind to say I’ve outgrown this place here, because it is, after all, home. But I have, and it isn’t really my room anymore. In some ways I’m also a little melancholic about the way I feel some of my memories are slipping from me, and I don’t fully remember what this bedroom used to be like.

I’ve just arrived in Singapore, but I already miss New York City so much. I feel almost guilty for my attachment to my apartment in Bushwick. But this is the first time I’ve returned to Singapore without the existence of a transitory dorm room, with all its restrictions on being owned with pictures, paint and personality, waiting for me on the other side of the journey. This time, I do have a home and an adopted city that I’ve chosen for reasons more than cheap rent or proximity to campus, and I intend to stay for a while.

So when I came in there
A million lines tried to reach me
And what I’ve seen out there
Too many words misleading