Saturday, 1 June 2019

Home Alone

One thing that I will no doubt miss when I move overseas to take up my posting would be, most ironically, living alone.

It makes no sense to my besties Stanley the sex bunny and Carl the dense one.

With Carl, of course, that's to be expected.

The poor chap is already grappling to comprehend everyday affairs in his life, and for someone who cannot list all 10 countries in ASEAN and has trouble with his nine times table, I don't have the heart to make my nearly 40-year-old macho friend mull over such abstract topics.

Stanley though, is a different ball game - ball being the operative word when it comes to him.

Stanley is quick thinking and can fully grasp every concept (and every body part when there's a chance) so for someone who can process information rapidly and recycle everything into sex jokes, I had very high expectations of him.

"You live alone here, you'll live alone there, status quo, full stop. End of discussion," Stanley said dismissively, his eyes speedily darting around like they were lasers of a point-38 pistol held by a shooter with advanced Parkinsons. 

The three of us were at Jalan Batu Hawker Centre, one of the oldest and cheapest hawker centres in Singapore nestled in central-east, right smack in an elderly HDB estate.

On Saturday mornings though, the hawker centre is populated with sweaty men in lycra, mainly recreational cyclists making pit stops en route to East Coast Park.

But once in a while, among those hobbyists, you spot one or two really hot young men among the average-looking crowd.

"There, there, there," Stanley said urgently, his laser eyes having found one such man, and locking in the poor target.

"He and I have many things in common," Stanley said to me while visually trailing the man balancing a tray of hot drinks. "We both don lycra, love hanging out with other men, and obviously love to ride."

While Stanley was slipping into a sex world, Carl was in his own whirl.

He pouted his lips in an upward angle and blew at himself furiously.

"What on earth are you doing," I asked with concern as Carl, who was sweating like a large bloc of melting candle, looked bothered.

"Hunny," Stanley said, at last paying some attention to our dense friend.

"This is the only time that I can look you in the eye and not tell a lie. You look really hot."

Carl frowned deeply, unable to process both Singapore's heat and Stanley's shade at the same time.

"Here, take this and fan yourself," I offered Carl a limp copy of Nikkei Asian Review - the only time I suspect he would touch such a magazine.

"No, I can't," our dense friend said with his teeth clenched.

"I have a macho image to upkeep," he said decisively.

Stanley later said privately to me that if only Carl would put in more thought into his everyday life instead of wasting brain cells on being obsessed with his physique and image. Perhaps, then he could get ahead in life.

"Like me," he added. "I'm smart, and I am not obsessed with my physique and image and yet I manage get head in life all the time."

Back home in my cosy apartment and away from the heat and crowd, the boys collectively heaved a sigh of relief just as they placed our ta-pao breakfast on my 2-metre long wooden table that could host the Last Supper, God willing.

Indoors, Carl let himself go and allowed his 70-kg of turgid muscles to relax and let his inner princess come out for a tea party.

He fanned himself with his hand as he animatedly pranced over to my coffee table and turned on every single air con unit in my home, thanking out loud the person who invented the machine.

Stanley is more practical and wasted no time in setting up the table for our local breakfast of wanton mee, char bee hoon, kway chap and a box of Tanjong Rhu char siew bao, the size of pre-puberty breasts, according to Stanley.

The Saturday-morning breakfast gathering at my place was my idea.

We wanted to spend as much time as possible together, and I want to eat local food as much as possible, before I took up my posting.

The one thing, like I said that I would miss very much, is living alone: I had come to love the apartment that I had created.

I had designed my apartment according to my lifestyle - I reconfigured the space so that I can host large parties of 15 on some weekends and not have friends feel like they're in a crowded MRT cabin.

And every corner of my home reminds me of my loved ones.

Before I moved in, the boys were heavily involved in my home set up.

They had each taken a day off to help me clean up my apartment post-renovation.

Stanley and I sat down and fitted together my Ikea TV console, with Stanley the trained engineer being the Project Lead.

We let Carl and his muscles do some work, but gave him a digestible task of assembling one of my small coffee tables which, to his credit, he completed with the help of the manual under three hours.

Two of my most beautiful and most expensive furniture pieces were bought with Stanley around: My wooden dinning table and my leather couch, custom made from a shop in a remote part of Singapore.

My sis contributed to my balcony bar table and chairs, which would later become Stanley and Carl's smoking corner.

And I always loved hosting at my place (one of the best things you can fill a home with, is laughter from fun gatherings).

Stanley only partially agrees, as he has his own interpretation of fun gatherings and what to fill up a home with.

Over time, I have grown to love the comfort of unlocking my front door and stepping into a home that I created.

A home that reminds me of so many things: Furniture that's tagged to loved ones, and most importantly, a place that reminds me that I am fortunate enough to have this beautiful home.

And so I would sometimes choose home over homeies.

Friday nights would sometimes be without my partner J and any form of company, apart from a bottle of Shiraz and cheese platter and Netflix.

All this, knowing at the back of my mind that if I choose to step out of my own home, I'd be walking out into the larger home where I have friends and family all over Singapore.

So in a way, I was alone but never lonely.

When I'm eventually overseas, I don't know if I would feel the same.

Later that afternoon, as the three of us lounged lazily like drowsy felines, Stanley whipped out a photo frame (from his bag) and passed it to me with a smile.

It was a photo of the three of us taken on one of those nights when we went to E-bar, Carl's favourite drinking place along Tanjong Pagar.

It was a good photo. The angle was top down making us look slimmer than we were.

And we were all caught in a mid-laugh: Me baring my teeth, Carl scrunching up his face in a boyish toothsome grin and Stanley with his eyes squinted so small they looked like ruler-drawn lines.

We looked happy that night.

And now, the mood and happiness would forever be remembered in this grainy photo, set nicely in a black frame.

Home is where the heart is were the words written at the bottom in Stanley's famously dramatic cursive.

"We will always be in your home, hunny," Stanley said as he pulled Carl in to join me in admiring our younger selves in the photo.

"We look gay," Carl pointed out.

"Yes, darling. We do. And we are queer to stay," Stanley replied.



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Adam's stories are based on real life events and inspired by real people

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