Lorelai Sharma
The credits for People We Meet on Vacation rolled across my small screen, casting a cool blue glow over the darkened room. I closed the laptop, left with a familiar, restless ache. It was a tender, hopeful kind of nostalgia that always makes me want to pack a bag and disappear. I stepped out of my apartment and walked down the open-air HDB corridor. The humid Singapore night wrapped around me immediately. Below, the distant hum of traffic on Telok Blangah Road mixed with the rich scent of damp concrete from an evening downpour.
Travel has always been my favorite way of becoming. When we leave, we shed the heavy expectations of the places that raised us. We step into crowded train cars and foreign airport terminals to try on new versions of ourselves. The strangers we meet and the places we wander through briefly alter our chemistry, leaving us changed.
Looking out at the sleeping estate, I thought of a woman I met last month during a long layover in Taipei. We were both waiting near a quiet boarding gate, drinking lukewarm tea from paper cups. She noticed my worn canvas backpack, covered in transit tags.
“Going back, or going away?” she asked, her voice raspy and warm.
“Back,” I said. “Heading home.”
She smiled, tracing the rim of her cup with a thumb. “I am going back to a small town in the mountains,” she told me. “I leave every year because the streets start to feel too narrow. But I always go back, because no other place knows my real name.”
That single, quiet exchange lingered in my mind long after our flight was called. It mirrored the exact tension I had just watched unfold on my screen. We love the thrill of the escape. Yet, the places that build us never truly let us go.
Hometowns are deeply complex spaces. They act as both a reliable shelter and a slow pressure cooker. Telok Blangah is my anchor, but there are days when the familiar geometry of these lift lobbies feels too small. The exact, unchanging aroma of kaya toast and strong kopi from the corner hawker center can sometimes feel suffocating. I know every crack in the pavement, every stray cat resting near the void deck, and the exact rumble of the Circle Line MRT running beneath us. Sometimes, the sheer predictability of it makes me want to run.
But eventually, the tension breaks. Sometimes your home simply calls you, pulling at an invisible thread tied right to your center. No matter how far I wander, or how many new layers I add to my life in transit***, I am always pulled back to the dense, tropical heat of this specific neighborhood.***
I leaned my arms against the cool tiled parapet, watching the yellow glow of a solitary bus moving through the dark streets below. The air smelled of rain and distant frying garlic. The urge to leave is always there, vibrating quietly in my chest. But as I listened to the steady, comforting rhythm of the estate settling into the night, the restlessness began to fade. The world is incredibly wide, but tonight, I will let these familiar streets hold me.