Back in Singapore, for the fourth time, I was comforted by the growing familiarity of the place, even as I was dreading the few weeks of teaching that I had left at the school. Why was I so averse to working with these apparently harmless children? Because they exhausted me, beyond reason. At the end of the day, I didn't feel like I had achieved anything, but merely survived to live another day. Like in warfare against a skilled adversary, I respected my opponents and learned their strategies of control even as I adjusted my own to better combat theirs. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes bloody, sometimes boring, they cycle continued, wearing on my mind and soul like a rough stone.

I had stopped smoking over a month before. Every day, I felt the draw of the mental and corporal pleasure smoking had brought me diminish slightly, but it was still there, in the idlers on the corners while my hands grasped at each other or fled to my pockets, in the loneliness of losing my on-again-off-again girlfriend of almost seven years who had made it at first sexy and then a comforting ritual of remembering.

I write this as the plump British girl on the bed to my left slathers her pink legs with sunscreen, and the potbellied Indian man in the bed to my right slyly watches her with wolfish eyes. I'm glad to be back in this hostel, even if it means three more weeks without privacy. The apartment that I recently vacated was far more uncomfortable than any situation here, and without any option for retreat.

Life ticks away on the watch of the girl waiting for her friend to return, ready to go to Changi and fly away on the next steel bird, out of this adders nest of a city. I give them directions to the nearest subway, and I can barely smell the mixture of curry and sweat emanating from the Indian roommate. Perhaps my own scent has overpowered it? He sits up and ponders how smoothly I interacted with those intrepid female adventurers. Indian women never sleep in a mixed dorm, so of course it must be very strange to him that I interacted with those women so casually in our sleeping quarters. His pornographic education didn't prepare him for reality.

None of ours did. I remember watching porn every night, and aching to take part in those wonderful fantasies that were even more wonderful because they were easy to believe for a young, horny, hormonally intoxicated and imaginative brain. Belief in those fantasies made me even more socially awkward with women, because I treated them only as sexual objects. And of course, I didn't get none, until I met a girl as sex-driven as I and as uninhibited as I wasn't.

But all that is in the past, a chapter still unwritten but already lived. Maybe I'll get to that later. For now, I am just relieved to have recovered the freedom of space and egalitarian lifestyle afforded to me in this abode, so sorely lacking in the self-righteous and uncompromising landlady of which I was a tenant for the last month. Note to self: be careful who you choose to live with.

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