nightfall

19 December, 11.56 pm 

Here I sit alone, propped up in my snug bed - the last remaining object in what was once my homely room. The wall lamp bathes these pillows and quilts in a warm light, the solitary red bed standing silently by the drawn curtains. Every tap of a key on my keyboard is accompanied by an eerie echo that resonates against the bare walls. Now-empty shelves cast dark shadows upon the naked wood of untenanted cabinets, their rows of books and former inhabitants now crated, readying themselves for a voyage halfway across the globe. 

Here I sit alone, my mind clouded with thoughts. The present is eternity, the now, this eternal moment. But this moment has now faded and has become the past. We now stand in the future. And so the cycle repeats. Boxes lie in dusty corners, a haphazard skyline in their own right. I will soon put out the lamp, and night will fall upon this cardboard microcosm. 

Here I sit alone, feverish and aching. Illness has decided to pay me a visit, its malicious farewell kiss to me. My eyes cloud over, and I yearn for Sleep. But Sleep refuses to come. My body anxiously awaits the raps on that door; will Sleep come knocking? All remains silent. In this bed, the final keepsake of my blissful childhood, I prepare myself for the final slumber, for its crate arrives on the morrow. Au revoir. Auf Wiedersehen. 

Thoughts swirl. This chapter has exceeded its confines. It is overgrown, imprudent, excessive. It must end. My mind isn’t ready. No. Yet, it must. I hear my sighs in the echoes. All is still. 

I flick the switch for the final time. And with an imperceptible hum, night has fallen. 

change.

Today marks about one hundred days till I’m gone and out of this country, and this harsh bit of reality only just set in this afternoon. "Why ‘harsh’?", many of you may be asking. I complain about this island incessantly, don’t I? Too hot, too expensive, too meaningless, too humid, too boring, too modern, too concrete, too un-European, too Asian. ‘Stop controlling yourself, Niall, just let it out. We all know you wanna get your ass outta here,’ you’re probably sneering. 

Well, maybe I do. And maybe I don’t. It was a rainy afternoon and long bus rides, especially during thunderstorms (even if it’s en-route to raiding another camp), never fail to be the perfect opportunity for some reflection. 

Everyone’s asleep. The pervasive silence is punctuated by the noise of little droplets of rain pattering against cold glass, of the spray beneath the tyres, that hush - it lulls you into a reverie of involuntary inertia and pensiveness. I curl up on the seat and think. I thought about how disjointed it would all be - that dim old Mowbray Road I take to camp everyday - in a matter of months, I wouldn’t be walking on it anymore. Or driving on it. That asphalt will be 10,000 miles away, no longer under these dusty army boots of mine. Heck, the car I drive would probably be in the scrapyard by then, and where these boots I’m wearing will be then - well, my guess is as good as yours. 

And Lord, it may be many, many years before I set foot in this country again. And that was when my heart experienced an unfamiliar yet all-too-agonising ache. I have a few weeks’ grace before this cozy home inevitably transforms itself into a storehouse of cardboard boxes, bursting at the brim; before I’m uprooted and have to leave the beautiful people and dear friends I’ve gotten to know behind; before I abandon all that is familiar to me. Perhaps a little too familiar. 

Before I begin a new chapter in my life. 

Never have I lived in one country for this many years at a stretch, and this sentimentality worries me. “You shouldn’t be feeling this way,” I’ve been told countless times. “You should be used to it - you’ve been doing it since you were born - literally,” they say. But I’m human, too, you know. Emotions and sentiments constitute my soul, the way they do everyone else’s. But mine have taken me over, they dominate, they reign, sie beherrschen. And this must not be. 

Comfort is danger, inertia is poison. Routine is toxic, familiarity dulls. Pull yourself up and out, Niall. These chains must splinter. They must go. They tether you to the mundane, to the tedious, to the commonplace and the banal. My heart screams, “no”, my mind shrieks, “yes”. I am in conflict. 

Perhaps it is time to treasure the mundane. One hundred days of monotony (and ordinariness) remain. Chapter 7 of my life begins thereafter. I desire it, yet I don’t. But I desire it nonetheless, passionately. And that desire shall suffice for now. 

Chapter 7 will be brief - es wird kurz sein - just eight months short. And an even more exciting and trying journey will begin thereafter. But it shall soon be time for change for the better, and for inevitable change - change that is charging at me, raging by the minute, coming ever closer, closer, closer - for that change must I ever be ready.