Sam Turner
Singapore skyline.
When you’ve been away from home for nearly a decade, nothing can be counted on to stay familiar. Favorite restaurants shutter their doors, trees that were old friends make way for new housing developments, and the paths you used to take from one place to another are broken.
When your home is a city like Singapore, every visit brings fresh change. Sometimes it seems as if the entire country is covered in scaffolding and perched upon by tall yellow cranes. Like an insect, the island molts as it grows, shedding plaster and porcelain to uncover smooth concrete and sharp, sleek metal. Everything you thought you knew has bought itself a new incarnation, afraid to be left behind by the storm of progress.
In self-defense, you become a tourist in your own home. You consult bus schedules and holiday brochures. You never assume you know where something is. You try to see things as a stranger would. And sometimes, when the effort of figuring out how you feel about this whole damn place exhausts you, you lie on your back in the middle of the city and imagine floating up into its crown of steel and glass.
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