In one month, I will be moving cities for the third time in four years. The difference? This time I will be returning to a city I once knew – one I first fell in love with fifteen years ago. 

New York City at 21 was like a dream come true. After spending three years in an idyllic college town that resembled Hogwarts, I was about to start adulthood in a city that I only knew through reruns of Friends, Sex and the City, and Gossip Girl. I remember stepping off the plane, blurry-eyed and brimming with nervous excitement about what was to unfold.

My first weekend in New York still lives in my memory like a flicker of film. I’d moved into a ground-floor apartment on 113th and Frederick Douglass, sight unseen. It was past 9pm. The place was empty, hardwood floors stark and bare. I decided to take a walk around the block and soon spotted a small wooden table abandoned on the sidewalk.

“I could find a use for this,” I thought.

Just as I picked it up, a man came running toward me, clearly agitated. The table, as it turned out, had an owner. The sidewalk was his home, and I was unknowingly raiding it. After a few tense exchanges, we settled on an amicable deal: ten dollars to make the table mine.

It became my TV stand for the rest of the year.

Now, over a decade later – this time older, gainfully employed, and returning on different terms, I know my reintroduction to New York will look different. But in some ways, I suspect it will feel the same.

That sense of wonder.

That ache of beginning again.

A few days ago, I met someone, not from the US, who told me he’d been living in the same apartment in Brooklyn for the past seventeen years. I gasped, loudly.

Not out of judgment, though I think he read it that way at first. I quickly reassured him it was only because I was startled. Somewhere along the way, all the moving I’d done had made the idea of staying in one place start to feel foreign to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve come to see change as the only constant. Or maybe, deep down, I’ve begun to confuse stillness with surrender.

It wasn’t always this way. Outside of college, I had spent my entire life in Singapore. When I returned from my stint abroad, I promptly adopted a puppy. A few years later, I bought my first apartment and moved out on my own. The roots I’d been born into were slowly growing longer, deeper – quietly anchoring me to the only place I’d ever called home.

But even then, something always felt slightly misplaced. 

I’d longed to live outside of Singapore since I was a teenager – years before Crazy Rich Asians hit the screens, and well before Formula 1 lit up our streets. Back then, Singapore felt invisible. Unremarkable to the greater world. Even now, I still get the occasional comment marveling at how good my English is. I suppose it must seem unlikely that a country out East could speak English as its first language. I could explain that not only do I know the difference between they’re and their, but I also studied Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath, to the extent of dissecting their every word.

Instead, I smile, and laugh it off.

I’m not offended. At least, I don’t think I am. Though sometimes, I wonder if I should be.

As I continued to build my career and move through a series of long-term relationships I thought might be the one, I started to feel at peace with being in Singapore. Not necessarily out of resignation, but out of circumstance. I had a well-paying job. I was twenty minutes from my parents. I got to bear witness to my two young nephews growing up – first learning how to walk, then learning how to call me gugu (auntie in Mandarin) on sight. 

A life stitched together by familiarity and love always provides. In comfort, and in closeness. In a way only home can.

Then, the pandemic happened.

Like the rest of the world, we went into a series of lockdowns, eccentrically termed “circuit breakers” by the Singapore government. I continued working my job in live sports, but from the solitude of my 431-square-foot apartment, instead of traveling to stadiums across Asia every other week. Not everyone was as lucky. We lost a third of our company to layoffs and furloughs.

Instead of seeing family and friends in person, we exchanged care packages. There was a certain novelty to it all – like having a sommelier on speed dial to deliver a case of wine, just because. Or discovering a new home baker and placing a dozen orders, because it was an absolute must that everyone I knew try her filled donuts.

There was still closeness, but it was held together by a thread of distance, stitched with WhatsApp messages and small, thoughtful gestures.

I used to say, half-jokingly, that the best thing about living in Singapore is how easy it is to get away. We have the best, most efficient airport in the world, and within two hours, you can be in a country with a completely different culture, language, and pace of life.

You could escape, briefly, and then return to all your creature comforts. To the overwhelming gratitude that comes with clean streets, reliable infrastructure, and food delivered faster than your mood can change. In other words, while you’re living in the 18th smallest country in the world, you still get to lead a life that feels expansive, larger than itself, all with minimal cost or inconvenience.

It was no wonder the pandemic made me pause, and return to that voice inside me, now speaking louder than it had in years. It wasn’t shouting. It didn’t need to. It was a bittersweet realization: that the life I had built no longer fit the person I had always wanted to be, and was still becoming.

So I left. This time with no one’s permission. On no one’s dime but my own. Two suitcases, accompanied by a now-senior dog – once again jobless, starting afresh, and armed only with a heart full of dreams.

Four years on, I’ve lived in LA, Miami, and soon, New York. I consider myself fortunate for being able to move with relatively little hesitation. After all, I’m already so far from Singapore that any city in America feels equally distant. As my brother once said, matter-of-factly, “It doesn’t really matter where you are. You’re just moving from one far away place to another.”

I’m still unsure when I’ll next see my family. Still living a life twelve to fifteen hours out of sync.

Yet, for all its imperfections, America has started to become home in a way. 

LA, which remains my favorite city in the world, still calls out to me like a lover forsaken that I am almost scared to return. 

Miami, which I used to resent in my first six months, has become familiar. My colorful apartment here, filled with art I’ve collected over the years, is now my happy place – a place of rest and quietude.

Choosing to move back to New York hasn’t been a trivial decision. I’ve spent most of this summer there, drifting between Airbnbs and hotels, occasionally flying back to Miami for week-long stretches at most. There have been days where I’d return to an unfamiliar room after a long day of work, overwhelmed by anxiety, and find myself in tears, whispering, “I just want to go home.”

But what is home, really?

Is it my place in Miami, designed and decorated with intention, and dare I say, taste?

Is it Singapore, where I was born and raised, where my support system remains, and from where I still carry its vermillion passport?

Or is it all the places I’ve lived and returned to over a dozen times, from Bali to Tokyo, where I have my favorite haunts, and a quiet familiarity that greets me each time I land?

The song by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes goes, home is wherever I’m with you. But there is no you in my life right now. Just me, my ambition, my desire for more, as if I haven’t lived enough.

As I greet this new chapter in New York, I can only hope I find home once again – as I have before. Over and over. All before knowing what street it will be on, what routine it will be a part of, and more importantly, what feeling it will bring.

The search never stops. Or maybe it does, once I realize it was never a place to find – but something I was meant to build, in myself, all along.

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