:: Photosynthesis ::

Planes cannot land with grace, they never do―they tend to tumble onto the runway with clumsy forcefulness. I heard the screech of friction and imagined the smell of burnt rubber. And as the oddly familiar wail of rubber-on-tarmac faded into a comforting thud, as the giant metal bird connected with its nest that was the airport terminal―then, see, the Singaporean sky, clear and concise―I was home.

In a way it was like I never left. After all, it had only been two weeks―nothing more or less than a pixilated window in my wired world. And I had left so much of myself here―I worried for my family, I couldn't detach myself from work, I was constantly in touch with the people and processes that made up my world―that my vacation became exactly what it meant: to vacate. I was my own vacuum and it was no victory.

But in a way it was like I never came back. It had only been two weeks, but it was two weeks coloured by so much visual stimuli that my memories are now tactile and voracious with life. It's a cheap cliché to be romanticised by the notion of novelle vie, I admit―but because Singapore is really a dislocated infant teething at the edge of history compared with the rest of Europe, I took to its cultures and past glories with thirst and the tepid patience of a bewildered child.

I have photosynthesised parts of Europe with this trip: I like to think I managed to capture the essence of each city I've been to with the solicitous fierceness of a plant begging life from the sun.

***

Two weeks and four cities. I feel like I've loved four different people in four different lifetimes:

Vienna. You are grey but dignified, an ashen aristocrat cradled by your blue-blooded past. You have a panache of quiet class, but that old-new tension of marrying the classic with the capitalistic is as blatant as the ugly advertisements adorning the scaffolded facade of the Stephensdom. Your people are kind―Frau Wolf, wie gehts?―and your art is the steely preservation of the artistic anatomy that becomes you.

Paris. The scarlet lady of Europe. I feel I must whisper your name rather than say it: je suis la belle, and you know it. Your magic has been weaved into our cultural consciousness long ago―you were a rough-cut Celtic gem that has been polished with passion into a haute couture high. You are extravagant and almost arrogant in your beauty; you don't care for praises and you don't work for charm. Your are savoir faire in technicolour, lending graceful amnesia to your flaws (immigrants! crime! graffiti and grime!). In your romantic legend we are fallen knights and disgraced felons―but oh, what a stylish way to die.

Budapest. If only you could shrug yourself completely free of your communistic cocoon―if only those bridges, like metal tongues across your belly, can bridge your past and present to your future with the delicate ease of a butterfly's flight―if only. I walked down your cobble-stoned streets and felt enveloped by the mulberry-coloured gloom. You are such a sleeping beauty, caped by the ivories of time. The Paris of the East, they called you. But you never quite retained that foreign exotica; now you are sated, and even though you still carry a certain dash of fashionable intellect―art nouveau, yes?―about your art and architecture, your stability has become a whiff of decay, festering in the solemn tension between Buda and Pest, your Geminian-twin cities.

And finally, London. What a heady concoction! You are a little mad, a little stiff, a little loud, a little racy: you are a gentleman and a heretic, a genius and a germ, a choirboy with a kooky glint in his eyes. You are the most cosmopolitan, and the least Eurocentric. You have a monarchy and a subway full of graffiti. You have theatres staging high art on the same streets where sleaze and sex hit the same high notes as culture and couture. You have a raging humour and an unforgiving currency. You don't charm, you swindle. You are home to Shakespeare and a bevy of tastes so mixed, I get drunk just by looking at the ingredients. I speak your language, yes sir, but your language doesn't speak to me. C'est tout!

***

This was never meant to be a homage to Europe. If anything, it's a biased caricature of the four cities that are now home to my dappled memories and vivid stories. I'm now back to life, my life: the languid misery of discontent is still shimmering like genteel foxfires over my horizon, but then I've always known that there is no magical exlixir to which this is a cure. I wanted to fly, and I did, a little bit―but I'm that proverbial bird with the broken wing, who may sing with opened beak about a wider piece of sky, but I'm crippled and lame, tamed by the solid, sordid comfort of its scruffy nest.

***
Thank you, as well, for your humour and candid concern: I must have been a burden of reluctant sentiment, and my logic has probably dishued the many colours drawn out by you. Still, thank you for your kindness and indulgence, and yes, we'll always have Paris.