À la recherche du temps perdu

When you return to your home city after being abroad for so long, you have to eventually accept the fact that the city you knew and loved, the one you tucked inside your heart and carried everywhere with you on foreign lands, the trails and haunts you recalled so fondly back when you were halfway across the world… that city and those special places do not exist anymore. The city of your memories is dead and gone.

Your favorite kopitiams and toko buku have long been out of business. You don’t know these newly-built roads and you misremember the old ones. The ones that ought to have stayed the same and led you to the same places and yet did not. You find yourself walking among a sea of strangers, faces that look like you with features similar to yours but with eyes that neither recognize you nor see you as kin. This is supposed to be home. And yet.

You are not a foreigner, but you are an outsider. A living ghost trying to retrace lost time.