A post from Uganda

(Actually two weeks ago) Today (yesterday, since I don’t have wi-fi at home) I cooked laksa fried rice and chicken rice for my host family and showed them pictures of Singapore. They liked it, which was great because I low-key messed up the texture of the rice using unfamiliar equipment, and with my host mother letting all the steam out for the laksa fried rice (which I should have used more water anyway) They retired soon after…which led me to another episode of aching nostalgia. It’s as if I have a secret life in me that I have not returned to, a place I’m supposed and do call home. It’s as if I will go back, and see all my friends and family again as if nothing’s changed even though that isn’t true. It’s as if I’ve been wandering for so long I miss the cheesy Changi Airport signs that welcome all traveling, admittedly also upper-middle class, Singaporeans, receive. Or maybe it was just the memories that each photo held, some kind of mysterious but familiar memory of just me and Daphne which tears at me, especially those city-lights on the riverfront. Maybe it’s being tired for the first time of the bigger world out there, with all its glories and failures at the same time. I know that Singapore is not ‘clean’ despite what the stereotypes and the government promise. But it’s still home. This has always kept me tethered, however arbitrary it is. That picture of Ying Yue at the Singapore Art Museum makes me want to read her blog and reconnect, even though I’ve tried it before but I guess my comment was lost. I know too, that I can get that same feeling of personal nostalgia, and I have, walking anywhere alone with my camera. But maybe it’s because those old photos of Singapore were my best of my oldest, they have that defining feature of ‘being there for me’; and I know that nobody else would have taken some of those very specific shots. Maybe because at my core is this melodramatic, pretentious melancholy that I know, when it came down to it, would let me walk out of a party/club if I wasn’t feeling it, by myself (or with Chris), down an empty, incandescent-lit street. I am bummed, although not surprised that the only person who connected with me over ‘the moon and the sun’ by ANECHOIS was Karen. I hope she’s doing well. I think I’m going to try and give Steele a copy of the EP/album since Yggdrasil is literally his door image. Maybe it’s just because it’s no coffee day.

^Wrote that a while ago but never remembered to post it while I had wifi, so I'm at a café now in Northern Uganda to post it. I've had a lot to say since, but as I'm tight on the wi-fi, I decided to just go with it.