I am Hardly Alone

We drove home from the airport in silence; the car reeked of detergent from the freshly cleaned and folded clothes, emanating with an unfulfilled purpose from the luggage. Despite having the whole backseat, I struggled to make myself comfortable, I couldn’t even tell him the bad news yet because of the time difference. It would still be dark where he was, only the nurses would be awake, I didn’t want to ruin Mum's night any more than her day.

The sun had been breaking clear and crisp when we first crossed the bridge into the city, by the time we had made the round trip from the airport, thin clouds had rolled in white and bright. an indecisive kind of weather that had none of the cosmic knowledge of a clear blue sky but all of its glare. I had only been gone two hours, but the home had received a new paint job, a new smell and had been downsized. It was more cramped than an economy seat.

But what was next? Facetiming her obviously, then schedules would need to be made, the next month of my life reassessed and reassessed again and again as each new restriction came into play.

We only spoke briefly, of the disappointment and of dice rolls.

Compassionate flight?

No, there are people far worse off than we are.

Reopening the borders?

Very unlikely, but I couldn’t tell you for sure.

I looked past her pixie cut, salt and pepper hair, out through the floor-to-ceiling window behind him. I could see the pixelated condominiums and IT towers rise out of the tropical greenery. A blurred impression, all the flaws in the plasterwork and smudges in the glass rendered out by bytes, disappearing into the borderlands of the ocean tubes before they reached me. O green world.

I’ll talk to you later, love you mate.

Love you too Mum.

The second item on the agenda was skittering pen drums on my desk for twenty minutes, the third was noodling the blues halfheartedly for a while and the fourth was staring at six different news sites all stating the same headlines.

Midday arrived graciously; food took me away from my ennui.

In preparation for the trip, I had cleared out the fridge. Tuna and mushroom fried rice it was. The oil and fat and acid and heat were a greasy but effective negotiation of the ingredients, binding them together apathetically, it was just the insipid sustenance I needed to get my insipid brain to start spinning. I took stock of the next couple of weeks and swirled the truth around my teeth without swallowing.

Just as a hypothetical, let’s plan like you won’t be going away after all.

Is this piece a little slower than usual? Churning along like a suburban bus route rather than gliding gracefully like an Airbus from A to B? My self-pity has occupied your story and is strip mining for all the catharsis it can acquire. Don’t worry, I solemnly swear that I’m unreliable, this isn’t really how things went. I’ll try and keep things chugging on, but (as I’m sure you’re familiar with by the time you read this) when the days meld together, it's hard to figure out how fast you’re moving at all.

The next week was hard on my senses, everyday smells got to me, I’ve so-so sinuses at the best of times. But the extra-strength sanitiser that I had reserved for a pandemic and the island reserved for a Wednesday was biting enough for me to well up. Even the crispness of the air-conditioner reminded me of the several million which stopped the whole isle melting into the Malacca. I felt Mum’s absence everywhere, but I suppose they had an absence of sanitizer too.

When it was sunny I wanted rain, when it poured I felt sewn tighter into the flat’s seams. My bed was unwieldy and the screech and drone of buses struggling back up the hill from the depot drilled far further into my head than usual, and this was despite the state cutbacks. I started to read Revolutionary Road, it didn’t exactly help my claustrophobia; as an alternative, I flicked through Singapore At Random, it’s less of a book than a hundred page Wikipedia article. The pages conjure up the satiated and overeducated cabal of Crazy Rich Asians rather than my friendly green quasi-dystopia, two different islands which flutter about on top of one another like a broken video asset.

While I was at Priceline picking up moisturiser I bought a green-tea spray on sale, the same one aunties and shopping centres spray the whole island with. It’s cheap and strong, it's like insulin, it controls the ebbs and flows. It oils up the fluttering islands and they start to flicker faster and faster until the afterimage is perpetual. It’s been three days and I’ve already used up half of it. I’ve decided to build a stockpile.

I’m reaccepting the distance mile by mile, minute flown by minute flown, each one of the 400 days or so. But the journey isn’t over, I haven’t seized the sword. I haven’t atoned, and I haven’t ascended to a higher plane since all the airports are shut.

No, the ordinary gets blurrier and greener the further back I think. Late afternoon runs through the botanic gardens, relieved by the cool breeze through Orchard Rd and all the way home. The Tonkatsu place where I would eat and brood (as teenagers do) to Elliot Smith before seeing a movie, I was always tall enough for the NC16 ones. I miss going to whatever weird spot Mum found in Little India that second week two trips ago, I forget the name; and Parkruns where I would be distracted from my PB by the eerie stillness of stoic steel sea giants, selling their wares in the Earth’s second-largest shipping port.

I suppose they’re not there at the moment, but soon Mum will be back. I hope it’ll be the same. I want it to be the same. It certainly won’t be, but I am hardly alone. So maybe that’s okay.