It’s been roughly 4 months since I’ve gotten to Singapore, and I’ve just begun the end of my stay. Having experiencing this “ending” twice before, you’d think I’d have a handle on how to say goodbye BUT…this sucks.
This was the first place I’d gone completely alone, knowing absolutely no one and absolutely nothing about Singapore (to be honest, if you had asked me to point it out on a map it would have taken quite some time and quite some guesses). It was a challenge to understand, to feel like I was doing it “right” (ie. not sweating every time I went outside), and to feel like I was making the right friends for the right reasons. I wanted meaningful, genuine relationships, and it was about a month ago when I realized I’d made just that.
I threw myself into Singapore with few resources to keep afloat, only knowing that I wanted local friends to leave behind, with the promise of a return in the future.
I was on the rugby team, I went to local art events, I went to screenings of movies with my friends and traveled and went dancing and got ice cream after class and dim sum at midnight. I rode bikes under the moon along the beach, went to concerts where I was on a first name basis with the band members, discovered the superior messaging app Telegram, and made myself a little space in a way I hadn’t in Shanghai or Milan.
I hadn’t been to anywhere tourists were until this week, on my way to a show I saw the Merlion. Weird how I can exist on such a small island for so long and just never come into contact to the Singapore that it presents itself to be. I feel like a local.
I wasn’t sure which pictures to include in this post, so here’s just a couple of what my life has looked like in the past few months:
