Not all who wander are lost, but some who wander want to be

(Post 2 of my 2024 Travelogue)

What they say really is true; your body remembers where it was born. I moved away from Singapore to Australia in 2018, but no matter how long I’ve been gone, my sleep schedule still keeps Singapore time.

For several years until I completed my Master’s, I would fly back and forth 2-3 times a year on cheap budget flights, sometimes spending a month there at a time. The pandemic changed this. Because of Australia’s merciless border policy, I knew I might forfeit my ability to return and complete my degree if I left, so I stayed. I did not go home for three years.

By the time borders opened again, my budget airline had discontinued the route I used to fly, and my life plans had changed. I was going to stay in Australia for good.

My most recent visit, on 15 November 2024, was my first time seeing home in more than a year. These trips always feel a little…strange. Always come with a little reminder that we’re growing apart, drifting away.

But it also startles me with uncanny moments of comfort—surprises me with how easy it is to slip back in, like a hand into a well-worn glove—to forget I ever left.

Because I still don’t feel at home in Australia, despite my seven years there. The world in Australia doesn’t work the way it did when I became who I am. It’s so big and yet so small, and I, forever an alien amid it.

For better or worse, the world feels stable, feels right, when I’m in Singapore: this is the reality I know.

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One of my favourite things to do as a teen, and then a young adult, was to wander. My family life was not great, so I took every excuse I could to prolong my time away from home. I played a sort of game with a simple series of steps:

• Step 1: Pick a random MRT station I haven’t alighted at before.
• Step 2: Take the train to that station.
• Step 3: Wander around in search of interesting things.
• Step 4: Figure out how to get home.

The Singapore MRT is dreamlike in its reliability, and moving around the city is as easy as taking a stroll. Like so much else, that efficiency is propped up by a ruthless work culture and the invisible labour of staff and engineers toiling through the night. But that efficiency is what made this pastime available as an escape, when the world seemed so loud and unyielding around me.

In every way but land area, Brisbane is quite small. Twice the area of Singapore with half the people, one can cross its central business district on foot in 20 minutes. I have been in and out of most of the buildings in the downtown by now.

Beyond it, there is nothing but suburban sprawl—hundreds of kilometres of houses, actively hostile to foot traffic. I cannot wander much, and when I do, I rarely find anything new.

The day after I arrived in Singapore was a lucky rainy Sunday. From that combination of factors, the CBD was far less congested than it normally would have been. So the first thing I did was to revisit my childhood game.

I wandered. I ate at places I didn’t know. I visited public sculptures and bridges I had come to see as friends. I waited patiently for the skyscraper lights to come on.

In my silly little game, the goal is to get lost. Some call this a dérive. Others call it sauntering. For me, it is the chance to be unlocatable, just for a moment, in a life that was orchestrated for me before I was even born.

I simply went wherever the streets called me, and met my city again—rediscovered the place I once lost beneath traumas and tragedies, with its colours and corners and towers touching the clouds.

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In Singapore, nothing ever stays the same—this is a refrain in a lot of my writing pertaining to it. This time, the city had gone fully cashless—I could pay for almost everything by scanning a QR code. No doubt this shift was spurred by the pandemic, but it had been in progress for at least a decade prior.

(I was the collateral of that change, actually: my digital government ID was attached to a phone number I no longer had, so I went to a community centre to update it. I have a new local phone number now, and will be keeping it alive with quarterly top-ups, even while I am living away.)

This visit was too short for me to do all the things I wanted to. I got to have lunch with friends I hadn’t seen since last year—went to the wrong restaurant at the wrong end of the country, rushed over to where they were. I visited a local library for the first time since COVID. I had breakfast at a hawker centre that had been refurbished to the point I no longer remembered what it looked like before. Old businesses had been replaced by new ones. It rained every day.

The wharf near my home, which taught me my love of boats—the one whose clangs and clatters and siren wails I grew up with—will be gone by 2027.

For each street I walked, I thought of three streets I hadn’t. I almost forgot how precious this freedom to move has always been, even if countless other freedoms are lacking here. It’s the thing I always feel the absence of, whenever I am away.

But this place is still here, after all this time, and will always let me through its gates. I left for a reason, and we have changed irrevocably while apart. But I don’t think we can ever become strangers to each other.