Of late, it has become increasingly difficult for me to make time for recreational writing. Apart from the brain dump I do quite frequently on another private medium, I find that coming up with sentences beyond what is required at work has become quite the challenge.
Let's face it, at work, I am, at times, swamped. Funnily enough though, on most days, I feel a quiet satisfaction with my job and its outcomes, so, I must say, I am probably swamped in the best way possible.
But let's get real guys, some days, despite having gotten back into the groove, so to speak, I think about "that version" of me quite often. Key words like "mountain" and "Leeds" and "desk" and "library", even, show up ever so often on my Google Photos search. Come to think of it, I really did savour every.single.moment. Not one moment seemed trivial to me in that one year in the UK.
I miss it more than I care to admit.
Each search I key into my Google Photos overwhelms me in a way that is both good and bad. Good because the memories, and I mean all of it, seemed to have etched a core memory and makes me feel lucky and ever so grateful that I am still given the opportunity to create core memories in my 40s. Yet at the same time, I catch myself still thinking of the life that could have been; of whether we could have been happier if we had remained.
Every now and then, we would revisit that question and wonder.
And every now and then, all of us who were there at the same time and had returned home in the past 1 to 2 years would also look back with the same wonderment, complete with throwback pictures of that ridiculously glorious life, and think about the "could-have-beens" and the version of people that we were while we were there.
I keep talking about this "version" of me as if I was a really different person.
And believe you me, I was a different version of me altogether. I don't know what that version would have become in the long-term, but for that moment, I would say that I was a better me while it lasted.
Maybe it was the cold air, maybe it was the natural boundary created from the 14-hour journey home which left us no choice or option but to survive, or maybe I was just able, for the first time in many years, be myself completely, knowing for a fact that no one knew who I was before. And deep, deep down, I believe that that last bit was the one which made life so much better.
There were no expectations as to how I was supposed to behave, or how I was supposed to act or react to certain things. I was free to completely reinvent myself as necessary and it was during that time that I opened and closed my heart to people all at the same time, both with the same kind of intensity AND clarity.
And to think that my big "why" wasn't because I was running away from a life that I hated here in Malaysia -- meaning that if I hated my life in Malaysia at the time we left, it would have been alot easier to justify why I loved my time there so much because it would just mean that I was infatuated with something new; much like when you're falling in love for the first time.
Although we know that deep down, staying on would have been an unreasonable decision, all things considered, but yeah, I suppose we sometimes just can't help but wonder if it really was just a pipe dream or a dream that could have developed into something more real had we given it a chance.
We always say that maybe we would have probably taken that leap of faith if we were younger.
We always tell ourselves that we would probably not have liked life abroad and that life back home were better.
But, like I said, I miss it more than I care to admit.
//written on August 13, 2026.
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