The city disappoints. I should have known it would, but I honestly thought otherwise. It was deeply foolish to romanticize home as a hotbed of new discoveries in a familiar land. This place is just as it was when I left, and there is no reason for it to change for me.

The friendships are the same - the same joys, the same annoyances, the same failure to view you as an individual different from the person they first met. The materialism of it all - if only because this island recognizes nothing else but success. The dullness of the average person, not necessarily because they are intrinsically insipid, but because all individualism blends together in this dense city of 4.5 million. And the vices - the dark escapes that we hatch in our moonlit flats, the acts of rebellion against conformity that deviate with such uniformity. Everything about this place suggests more, and it is always falling short.

There are valuable things to miss about this place - the food, the efficiency, the security - and all of this makes Singapore a good place to live. There are abstract things to miss about Cambridge - the idealism, the intellectual environment, the privileged aura - and all of this makes Cambridge a good place to study. But it seems that home, or at least my conception of it, lies not in a geographical position, but in a few select friends - the friends to whom I recount my hopes and disappointments, with whom I pick apart the events of our lives to find the same nothingness inside.