Leaving Town.

I quit work in a week.

I'll be starting at business school in the fall and coming back to this same old town. A part of me is tired of Boston and my wandering feet would really like me to move somewhere different. But another smaller part of me has grown to love my quiet town masquerading as a city.

Soon, I'll be back for a month and half in a very different sort of city - the place I grew up in. A place I left seven years ago now and never really looked back on. A place that I'm not sure I'll ever fit in again. When kids move from a small town to a big city, upon coming back to the small town, there is a familarity to everything and a kinship to everyone, a web of connections that you don't have in a large city, drawing you in both supporting you and holding you down. Why is it then, that moving from Boston to Singapore feels the same way? Singapore may be the bigger city but maybe because its the town I grew up in, it's even more of a small town than Boston is in terms of mindset of the people.

I've had room to stretch these few years. Room to grow wild and unchecked for a bit. But for the next two months, I suspect I'm going to get sat on and pressed down for a bit. I wish home and being myself weren't so mutually exclusive.

I am a coward. I hide my beliefs at home because it's easier not to argue. It's easier to be something I'm not in order to avoid conflict. In the end, I'm not sure which is the right path. Should I stand up and fight my losing battles with my elders or is it enough that I know that I will not change them and they will not change me and keep the peace?

I lie with my silences. I lie without words everytime I nod and smile and just pretend I don't hear hear the insinuations on marraige, appearance and girls acheving entirely too much for their own good. Sometimes I get scared that if I stay there long enough, I'll start to believe my own quiet lies. It's so much easier to tell myself I can do things when there aren't a million other people telling me I can't.

I am a Singaporean who has abandoned her city. I have evaded any responsibility of contributing back to the land in which I grew up. But like an unwanted child, I don't think I ever fit in in her family. Long before I left her for a place halfway around the world, she had already abandoned me.