Insomnia. (Redux)

I wax lyrical the moment I can't get enough sleep. I guess it's the only time I find to unburden my thoughts, when the day is done and the night is silent around me, settling in a comfortable blanket of solitude.

I ran my IPPT earlier today, surprisingly coming in with a better than expected result. Perhaps the work of some higher being, but I'd like to think I worked my ass off for it. There we go, no more RT... for now.

Recently i've ran into a close encounter with some existential angst, following the departure of a few wonderful Honky friends whom I had met in Edinburgh. Their coming heralded a new age of fun and laughter, joy and friendship. And a side of me that I hadn't seen for almost 2 months. I didn't do that much. Just played myself as a good host and brought them around to my favourite places, ate my favourite foods, talked as much (or as little) as I knew about Singapore's history.

But I don't know why. I have never felt this carefree and footloose for a long long time. It's almost as if since I touched down in my homeland, the weight and cares of my life has resettled around me like a leaden cloak, dragging my shoulders down, keeping my head firmly set on putting one foot in front of another in unerring rhythm.

Don't get me wrong, I love my job. I like the people, I enjoy the job. But something is missing. I'm not sure if it's the people I had with me on exchange that triggered this metamorphosis of boring serious Luke into fun and playful Luke (yes, even I can tell when I'm boring), or it's the situation of where I'm working.

I liked it when I was more fun. I thought I was more interesting then.

It might just be some inner mindgame... Or is it just that different people bring out different things in me?

Peaches.

I was teaching one of my tuition kids something, when her mom came out and passed me a peach. She had a habit of feeding me while I was there, a fringe benefit of the job. (Besides the job satisfaction of teaching, that is.)

It was a massive peach. Round, reddish, redolent in its ruby splendour. Freckled with little yellow spots, like dimples in its blushing cheeks. It's perfume was enticing, smelling sweetly reminiscent of apples, yet uniquely ravishing in its character. Lacking the tart sharp sweetness of simple sugars, the fragrance exumed a refined quality of sophisticated delight.

I held the magnificent peach up to my nose, letting its subtle flavour waft into my mind. It was intoxicating.

My tuition kid was laughing at me. She had been doing her work for the last 5-10 minutes, all the while looking bemusedly at me sniffing the peach as if it was an olfactory gold mine. She had finished hers already. She asked me, "Why haven't you eaten it yet?"

Ah, but how could I tell her? The smell of the peach was a heaven unto its own. The vivacity of that strong scent brought it into a life of it's own, enthralling the senses, lulling one to imagine the peach as larger than life, full of flavour and sweetness. However, the perfection of the peach lay only in it's scent, for it is the scent of the peach that calls the fruit-lover, the taste of the unknown. What if I eat the peach, and find it less than fulfilling? Should I have been content in just smelling it all the while?

Before this degenerates into a needless philosophical discourse, to cut the story short, I ate the peach. As expected, it did not live up to my expectations.

But whose fault is it that it didn't? Was the fault mine, that I had expected too much from a simple fruit, and had built up my expectations too high? Or was it the fault of the peach, with it's alluring fragrance, tricking the fruit-lover into thinking that the peach was tastier than it looks?

Taking nature's view of it, it is an elegant solution to the problem of attraction. The peach simply had to attract fruit-lovers to it, for in the process of being eaten, it would be transported to new pastures to grow and reproduce. It is not necessary for the fruit to be sweet and tasty, for the attractive smell alone had achieved its goals.

But of course, if you ask any layman, he would find that the fault is in the fruit-lover, who loves fruits but does not understand them. Hence each time he tastes the fruit of his labour (heh heh) he is disappointed.

In my mind, the fruit-lover has to be an eternal optimist. Each time he sees a fantastic fruit, he has to try it, to find out if the fruit tastes as good as it looks. And even if it doesn't? Well, there's always different kinds of fruits, and new ones all the time.

But someday, when he knows the peach a little better, he might come back, drown in it's intoxicating spell for a moment, and take a bite.

I wonder how that will taste.