For too many a year now I am only able to talk to you in my head or, often to the faded photo that sits in the mottled silver frame on my sideboard. We still have some great conversations however. Often these are "add ons' to the stories you told me occasionally as a child, more so now these 'conversations' are about your time when you were here in Singapore, Penang, Borneo, Malaya (as it was then) Now they are changing more to me telling you what I have done, where I've been, what little gem I've discovered on this island I have grown to love. I'm sure you would barely recognize the place, now over half a century on since your time here. Even land marks have been moved to new prominent locations and the concrete "kampongs" in the sky have replaced the wooden kampongs and jungle that you told me about. You loved the people and said they were the friendliest you'd ever know, you taught me the odd malay word, which I hardly dare try out with my Malay friends!!
I was so cross with you for not being here to know that I had moved here, but I hope some way you do, I feel this was somewhere I was meant to move to. Ok I know very little of actually where you went and what action you met, as you were a very private person and kept some of the horrors to yourself. In some small way I feel I have walked where you walked, although probably its concrete and no longer soil. I fell in love with this country and feel incredibly at home here. I'm comfortable, relaxed, free to do what I want with no one judging me.
With apparently the end looming to my time on this little red dot, I'm sad, but blessed to have been where you went and to have felt, Im sure, the same you did. Im not sure I will go as far as getting tattoos on my arms as you did, but there will certainly be an invisible tattoo on my heart with SG inscribed on it. This country and SE Asia will always be special to me, after all I am my fathers daughter
