Writer's Block

When I got into major quarrels with her, I remember that the first thing that I wanted to do was to walk away. To leave things as they were, to not have to deal with the issues that were thrust right into our faces. I never did have the courage to walk away though, and all I did was threaten to walk away; which probably gve her the idea that I never would. Not that day, not the next, not ever. Because I may not have been the best guy around, but I did my best to stay around.

Well my mind was jolted back to this awkward contradiction between my desire to walk away and the lack of courage to. I wanted to walk away because having those arguements made no sense to me. On the other hand, I didn't want to leave things hanging. Contrary to what most people think, I liked to kiss my girlfriend goodbye everytime we had to say goodbye. It's a little hard to do when you walk out of the house in the middle of an arguement isn't it?

The fact is, there still is a certain kind of longing to leave that is deeply etched in the person that I am. So throughout these few weeks that I've had a case of 'writer's-block', I've been trying to figure out just what is so attractive to me about the concept of leaving.

There are few things that can fall on both sides of the line. Leaving is one of them. Any person who leaves his company, girlfriend, family, country or anything else, can and will be labelled as a coward by some, and a hero by others. To quit your job or breakup with your girlfriend is not an easy thing to do hence the bravado; then again compared to facing your job/girlfriend every single day when you know you don't exactly want them, leaving seems like the easier thing to do and hence the cowardice alleged by some.

When you walk away from someone, you turn on back on her, which means that you walk in a direction opposite to her from now on and probably for a long long time. If you should ever reurn, she would have gone on without you, enjoyed life without you, heck, she could even be happily married with children, and none of these events included you as a part of it. Now depending on hw you look at it, would you be a coward or a hero to leave her?

Similarly, when you leave your country, you turn your back on her. For the next few years or decades of your life, you will never see the streets that you have walked on. You will never see the area that you grew up in. You will never see the people with whom you grew up with; not your parents, not your childhood friends, not the mee-pok man down the lorong. Sure they might visit you wherever you are once in a while, but how different would that be from meeting what you might call a 'familiar stranger'?

Perhaps the most painful part about leaving is walking out of the lives of the people that you care about. Your family and friends. How many of them would leave with you even if you asked them to? One, if you're lucky? To start your life away from a place you have called home for the most part of your life is definitely something frightening but utterly attractive to some. In fact, some people thrive on the unfamiliarity of location, lifestyle and cultures of different places around the world. They choose to live their lives like urban nomads and the truth is, they are probably what real jet-setters are like; not the suit-donning senior executives who seem to garner the respect and admiration of many for 'travelling the world', when when they've seen all around the world are the insides of planes, trains, offices and cafes that are almost exactly the same anywhere in the world.

So would you leave if anyone asked you to?

*This cannot be taken as an analysis of the concept of leaving, just extremely random rants.*