토요일, 1월 17, 2004
less than 24 hours before i make my way to england again. one part of me wants to go back to my friends in uni, but another part just wants to stay home with my family. guess it's times like these when i wish that i had stayed to study in singapore.

somehow my mind comes to a standstill whenever i wish to articulate the leaving emotion inside me. besides the fact that my mental faculties grind to a halt whenever the word 'plane' is mentioned, i can't believe that the time has passed so fast. in the one month that i've been home, the thought that i've practically frittered said time away has plagued me incessantly. i wish that i could be a person with nary a care but for the books that lie at the bottom of my suitcase as i type this, but alas, that be not the case. this christmas holiday, i admit to having made less of my work than i would have liked, which is a bad thing, since lectures resume in less than two days. admittedly, it gets one a bit down.

at 10am on saturday morning, i sit down and type away on my laptop, trying to say what i want to say by forcing the words past my grey matter. sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. right now is such a time.

i often wonder what life would be like if i had chosen another path in life. would i be in any way different? the mind ceases to think about the endless possibilities of the outcomes in the occurrence of theoretical parallel universes, if such things do exist at all. i remember just a year and a bit ago, how most of my time was spent with maybe 20 others in a small classroom, head bent dutifully over ministry-issued paper, writing, making words flow seemingly effortlessly from mind to pen to paper.

i never saw the use of using long, difficult words to express myself. after a while the body gets tired of such complications, trying to get past such complexity, it breaks itself down and separates the psyche into clear-cut emotions, never more to enslave the person to the shackles of unwilling emotional burden. simplicity is beauty, i was always taught, and how true, seeing that one's life dangles tantalisingly over a veritable abyss of despair, fraught with a web of tribulation that ever threatens to close in. only with simplicity, with an unfettered mind, can an individual rescue himself from the labryinth that is human existence. when the extraneous is taken away, only then can the core meaning be recognised and appreciated.

there is nothing better in this world than to have the love of family. sometimes it's hard to come to grips with a notion as abstract (hoho) as that, but then again, that's the quintessential hang-up that people have. this time, it's going to be a long half a year that will pass by in a flash (as usual, the ever-useful paradox), but i'm going to have to make use of it as best i can.

sounds like a new year's resolution to me. *hrm*

when i step through the boarding gates this evening, i know that the sourness i feel in my soul stems out of the fact that i know now that i am on my own, not because i have been forsaken, but because i am trusted to come into my own.