this post marks my return to philippine time and to normalcy after a three-week, europe-sotted, abhorrently unproductive haze. i slept before midnight last night, woke up at 8am for work, and started actual scriptwriting at 2pm (it’s a slow day). i am happy to finally attribute whatever sluggishness i feel at the moment to a lack of exercise, and not to a seriously screwed-up body clock.

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i flew to singapore with acs over the weekend to perform at the esplanade with japan’s gaia philharmonic choir and singapore’s syc ensemble singers (more on which later). ironically, it was in lah-lah land where reality finally caught up with me. and i actually expected that to happen.

mostly it was because of marlon. “whenever i see him, life just begins all over again,” i once wrote of him in my journal, over a year ago. i told him that a few hours after i arrived (at the ungodly hour of 1:30am — cebu pacific’s “new filipino time” is disturbingly similar to the old filipino time). i also told him, “this time, i really need it to begin all over again,” as i shed tears that surprised even me. it was only then that i realized how physically and emotionally exhausting drifting in my post-europe limbo had been for me the past three weeks.

“i have something real that’s waiting for me,” i also wrote of marlon, more recently in my little tour notebook. so reality didn’t so much hit as it did embrace me. it was a gentle, warm, reassuring reunion.

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over the past three-and-a-half years, i have made for myself a play-and-pause pseudo-life in singapore. i have routines and favorites, peeves and preferences, memories and secrets there, and a person who is like home to me. but my pseudo-life in singapore will actually become an actual life in singapore very soon. that was another reality i came face to face with this weekend, and it wasn’t so bad.

i left all the sightseeing to my friends and just spent time doing my typical singapore weekend things: spending a couple of hours on marlon’s ps2 (final fantasy 12 is gorgeous), waking up late, stepping out of the house well after lunchtime, walking around bishan and orchard, enjoying a massage, jumbo dinner, and a movie (marry me daniel craig!).

i didn’t feel in a rush to do anything. mostly because it occurred to me that next year, i will have all the time in the world to do whatever i want to do in singapore. okay, maybe not all the time in the world; the deal marlon and i struck is a year to a year and a half in singapore, tops.

that’s a lot of time in lah-lah land, time that i didn’t count on spending there, and pretty soon i’ll have to figure out how to fill it. part of me is actually looking forward to that — the part of me which was fearless and kebs and used to make life lampaso on a regular basis. she’s been buried under a lot of things the past couple of years, and it’s time to trot her out again. this should be interesting.

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resurfacing to my reality is like watching a flat piece of paper slowly morph into a three-dimensional object (or at least what i imagine that would be like). there isn’t just one thing to consider anymore; i had been staring so long at photos on a monitor and stamps on a passport, that i had almost forgotten that life is so multifaceted and deeply layered.

i’m back. hurray.

(don’t worry, i still plan to blog about europe.)