You are here, and this is now
Monday, October 20th 2003, 1940 hours
Location: Lit Honours Room 1
Weather: sticky
wish I had time to write poetry again, though I know I haven't written anything in six months. But it's deadline season, I've got five essays to write, and I'm mostly either holed up at home or in the Lit Honours rooms. We're making one of them nice and cosy: couch, rug, posters, TV, VCD player, coffee, tea, crackers, lamp. The other's still industrial-plain. I work in that one. The other's just a little too comfy now.
But now I'm cooped up indoors all day long, and - in the Honours rooms - there isn't even a view from the window, to watch the day change. I'm tired of this; though I like my work, I really don't want it to be all I do. I want to feel the sun on my skin, see the sky, breathe fresher air. I want to head out on a nice long walk; maybe I will when the deadlines clear. I miss Chapel Hill, and the peace I found among the trees, oak and beech and maple. The leaves must be turning there, right now. I'd love to see them again. Here in Singapore there's the raintree, and palm, and angsana; but the air is thicker and heavier, insects are everywhere, and the viciously green undergrowth can be oppressive at times. It's also been raining a fair bit lately; the earth is wet and black and clings to the soles of my boots. Heavy in the air, the smells of mud, and cars, and insecticide. Smells of childhood, and of home.
This place does have a beauty of its own, especially in the mornings: a busy dusthazed industrial sort of beauty, not unlike a foraging beetle. But by the afternoon it's just hot, or wet, or (more usually) both at once, and nobody really wants to venture out into the sticky weather. But I've walked elsewhere now, over mountains and fields in other lands; I've trodden different soil, seen different vistas. One day I'll go back there, walk once more on kindlier ground, among other trees. But for now I'm here. I'll take what there is.
And inside me too there is something else that disturbs, elusive, niggling. Every now and then, a flicker-flash of beauty mixed with pain... a poem perhaps? Time knows.