Singapore

It’s difficult to be confident you’ve ever seen rain like this.

It hammers down outside the bus, a sheet of water more than any imaginable number of drops. You snap a picture, despite having long been aware of the futility of capturing any kind of precipitation on camera. Here, though, the photo comes out as a rectangle of only blearily visible traffic, obscured by a window masquerading as a waterfall.

This is, you suppose, what they call a monsoon. Is there a difference, definitionally, between a monsoon and a storm? Is a monsoon just what it’s called when a storm happens in Asia? This question obviously has a very simple answer that would be very easy to find if you were the kind of person with the common sense to do very simple things very easily.

Under this biblical deluge, you disembark in front of a mall. The mall’s entrance is just far enough from the bus stop that you become drenched as you walk there.

The mall turns out to be a sort of quasi-open-air structure. Three walls and a floor beneath about 60% of a ceiling. The missing 40% offers a view of the heavens, and an access point for any floods they care to offer. The basically-outdoors mall is also air conditioned, despite being roughly 85 miles from the equator, in a banal demonstration of excess that might make an American exurb blush.

You’ve come to this mall to buy a Christmas gift for a person you don’t really know. You had to resort to this mall because the store you wanted to go to in the last mall was closed.

You’ve come to Singapore because the ship stopped here. You were on the ship because you joined the Air Force six years ago.

The second-person narrative structure you became infatuated with however many years ago is getting kind of awkward, don’t you think? Is it less effective now that the things you do are so unusual? It was easier when you were younger, and all you asked of the reader was to put themselves in the shoes of a directionless young man riding the train home from work with too little money and far too many feelings.

Maybe it’s more effective now.

Singapore, unlike most things, did not disappoint. The town is a jewel, all skyscrapers and colourful lights and water and greenery. It’s also impossibly clean, thanks to the insistent hand of the state. You breathe easy, swaddled in the familiar experience of navigating a subway system that snakes under the kind of buildings that give you vertigo when you look up at them. Your colleagues seek out the exotic and novel, which is very sensible and good for people on an adventure. You, however, can’t waste one of the few opportunities you have to be at home.

This is going well so far. Keep it together. That last one you wrote spiralled out of your control into a depression-fuelled rant. Don’t let that happen again. It’s so tiresome.

Home.

“I hear Toronto is a really homey city,” says the woman at the cocktail bar, with all the authority of someone who lives at least an ocean and half a continent away from it, but has relatives who live there.

“What do you mean by that,” you ask?

It’s a slower-paced city, she explains — one that engenders feelings of comfort. In her tone, you hear the gentlest accusation of inertia. You smile a little before replying.

Later, you and your new friends are smoking outside the bar’s camouflaged doorway.

Pause. Rewind. You skipped a part.

She says what she wants in life is freedom. She wants to be in such a situation in life that she can go where she wants to go, do what she wants to do — rich, you translate internally, but specifically independently rich, which is more admirable.

Later, you and your new friends are smoking outside the bar’s camouflaged doorway. She talks about what she wants to do next. She wants to live somewhere else. Somewhere like New York City. You say that’s a very natural thing to want. You offer your own experience with seeking adventure: Joining the military and living in a new city every other year, being flung to the other side of the world, wanting the whole time to go home.

“I am, after all, a very homey person, from a very homey city,” you say.

You ask her to dinner the next day. She says no.

Every Singaporean you talk to complains that the city is very boring. This charge dumbfounds you at first. How could such a place be boring?

But as you think about it, you begin to understand. When you asked your cocktail companions about their hobbies, they were briefly speechless.

“This,” they said eventually. “Going out.”

You can only eat at so many world class restaurants, drink at so many world class bars. A country that’s only a city, even if it may be the greatest city in the world, is only a city. A utopia can be its own kind of prison.

You develop a new type of appreciation for the place you’re from.

That last one was supposed to be a love letter to Halifax, the most recent adopted home you left behind. That that was lost was part of the reason your collapse into emotional ranting was so frustrating. You also had a vague idea that it would be partially a farewell to your friend, Scott, once your best friend in the military.

Keep it together.

You really are quite fond of Halifax. It’s a sterling example of perhaps your second-favourite genre of city: East Coast industrial once-powerhouses whose glories time is doing its best to forget, now as blue-collar and rough-edged as it is youthful and overeducated. There’s a lack of pretense to a town like that, even around the universities, somehow.

How does the old saw go? Kind, but not nice.

There’s always something to eat, always someplace to drink, even if donairs kind of suck.

But you’re not there anymore. You’re halfway through a deployment halfway around the world (which, as you like to internally remind yourself, condescending to no one in particular, is as far around the world as you can go before you’re actually getting closer to where you started). This is rich and beautiful in a way that little else is. Minute by minute, you are actively living a life that vanishingly few people have the opportunity to, as the Major likes to remind you and others in various ways at various times. You didn’t necessarily expect tactical sentimentalization to be a technique of military leadership. One could imagine worse ones.

You’ve recently started to read a book called Fail Better: Why Baseball Matters. One of your best friends, a student of the philosophy professor who wrote it, recommended it to you years ago. Every other line of it is life-changingly beautiful prose. You expected it to be a philosophical treatise that uses baseball as an extended metaphor for life. However, it’s turning out to be a paean to the sport that uses life as an extended metaphor for baseball.

This is deeply frustrating to you, as a person who’s spent the last 14 years imagining that you were that genre of literature’s inventor and most prolific practitioner — admittedly a cartoonishly arrogant presumption. “Not all philosophers are fans of baseball,” Kingwell says as if to mock you at the close of his first chapter, “but all fans of baseball are, after their own fashion, philosophers.” Fuck you, man.

The Blue Jays squeaked into the postseason this year and didn’t win a single game before being eliminated. It’s encouraging that they didn’t require your supportive presence at home to carry out their business as usual.