My parents moved three times if I am not mistaken, in their entire life together. And I was only part of one. The first one was before I was born, or soon after – I can’t recall. The last one was a year and a half back when I was in Jakarta. In my own independent life I have moved seven times. This will be the eighth. And my moves are always complicated. I have this irrational attachment to my things without which I feel incomplete! So I drag along my voluminous collection of music, books, films and odds and ends that I have collected over the years from different places that I have been to, not to mention other non-essential things such as clothes! 

“Never have I been able to settle in life. Always seated askew, as if on the arm of a chair; ready to get up, to leave.”

Andre Gide

What bugs me most is the fact that this is not the life I had planned for myself. At the very worst and safest, I had envisaged a life of quiet domesticity, such as my father and grandfather have led before me. I knew and understood my moralistic limitations and I accepted that I could take it forward only so far and no further. What I wouldn’t give to be in that place right now. The general meaningless and absurdity of life would have found itself a predictable and honourable middle-class pattern. But there is nothing I can do but wait, knowing that none of my weirdest dreams will ever come true and that some of my most normal hopes and desires are still out of reach. Is this my compromise with life? I wish it isn’t. For the price of this compromise is far too great…