Arab Street.

Aloha.

Only one way up.

I really do wish I could say that! And I really do wish I was chillin’ in Hawaii rather than working 22 hours a day in Singapore. Oh, when I say working, I don’t mean that I’m employed. Nope, I work for free, for my own benefit. In fact, I pay to work. Epic, isn’t it?

Ah, the life of a college student. To be more precise (as Thomson and Thompson would say) the life of an Arts student.

But I do feel proud of being able to call myself an Arts student. 🙂 But I’ straying from the main topic, aren’t I? The main topic being… *dun dun duuuhhnn* Arab Street in Singapore.

For those expecting a factual description or an emotional ‘oh-fak-I-was-so-wowed’, I’m sorry.

Yes, I was wowed. But that is besides the point.

There was only one thing that made any sense to me on that day. Everything else is, quite honestly, a (as the singaporeans say) BLUR. OMG lah! Everything so BLUR!

The one thing I constantly do on visiting a new place is to breathe in the air, the sights, the sounds and try to dissolve myself into the story of the location. When you visit Arab Street, however, you realize that you cannot drown yourself in a single story that makes that place. You cannot breathe in a single smell or one sound. There are a multitude of sounds and sights that do not make any sense put together. Rather, they strive to be heard or seen or EXPERIENCED over one another. Arab Street is a vast sea of stories, of emotions, of guttural languages and smooth dialects,  of smells that scream mixes of cultures that can and cannot be identified and of sights that implore at passerby’s to contemplate the extent of its antiquity.

Arab Street is like one of those albums that ,when heard continuously, does not make any sense whatsoever. You cannot listen to one song and believe you know what comes next, or even claim that they are connected.

Arab Street was a realization. There in those cramped little streets, hundreds of people with dreams were looking upward. They had their own stories to tell. Some stories that held them down, some that set them free. There, in a small part of an island country, hundreds of people were all looking upward toward something more, or something better.

I am one of those gazzilion people around the world who claims to look up. Because I want something more than just me? Because I want something more than what I already have? Because I dream?

But I’ve realized something. Looking up only pulled my head deep into the clouds. And yet I can’t look down, lest in doing so I might just end up pulling myself to place where there is no hope.

So shall I look forward? Straight ahead? I am one of a gazzilion people. But I look ahead.

And in doing so will I light up the world with the tiny little pieces of me(art) that I leave behind? I know I have all the potential to be anywhere I want to be.

I’ve lost you, haven’t I? 😉