RO ON SPACE & CITIES – 1

TWO CITIES. TWO DIFFERENT BRANDS OF SILENCE.

There’s something so very raw yet refined about the nomadic life that expats live in Singapore. They know instinctively to cut themselves smaller, chunkier, meatier, richer slices of life. It is as though life itself is a two-year contract in this exotic new destination, so there’s an urgency to grasp it more fully. As a result, more intense relationships are formed, more beach volleyball played, more cigarettes smoked, more regional travel explored, more love made, and more wine drunk than possibly anywhere else in the world – or so it seems. One meets more travelers, evoking and slaking that wanderlust, in a quest to discover new places and people within themselves.

So I was not alone in my journey of search a few years ago, when I would fly San Francisco to Singapore every three weeks with a day’s stopover on the neutral grounds of Tokyo. Here, I would trade one of my identities with the other. The SIM cards on my cell phone would also switch on a different set of contacts, just as the currencies exchanged. It was a thin line I tread between my two lives – one with myself, the other with my husband – and I needed both to survive who I was. I’d lost my soul in San Francisco, and needed to keep my sanity. So who I became in Singapore was my therapist.

When I’d moved to the Bay Area, the silence of space had struck me like a giant slap across my small face. The empty vastness of the skies was marked with weird cloud patterns by the invisible paintbrushes of winds. The desolate sound of airplanes tore across the silence. On the wide freeways, cars moved mechanically in synch, each distancing itself from the one ahead as much as possible. There were no human sounds upon my ears, and the few people I met didn't appear to need people - or did I sense a certain shame in their admitting to having this need? Perhaps too much physical space had created a proportionate amount of emotional space, which had evolved into emptiness and cold distance? Perhaps why almost everyone I knew then saw psychotherapists more often than they did their friends, and were resigned to the loneliness that was their most frequent and forced companion?

When I'd reach Singapore in the little hours on the clock, the swish-swish of palm trees on the ECP would brush away these meandering thoughts. I’d refuse to be picked up, as I needed to be completely alone with My City. Out of the airport in a trice, soaring in a taxi that was redolent of rice and pandan leaf, and freezing with air-conditioning, I’d roll down the window and inhale the humid air like a dog hungry for new smells.

I’d exchange different brands of silence with the two cities. I’d trade that lonely, desolate, restive, cold, dreary, impersonal no-answer stillness in San Francisco for a deep, long, communicative, pregnant, hushed, comforting quietude in Singapore.

Although I had a cartload of relationships, with a key hidden here in a purple sock or there a jungle boot waiting for me to pick it up, I’d stay the night with my other self in a Nonya-style suite at The Intercontinental, where swinging wooden doors set with bits of colored glass would ground me to this dreamy reality.

Then all the text messages would come pouring in... like tropical rain.