Perspective

So i'm back from my holiday in Egypt and my extended holiday in the Philippines. It would be time wasting to pen a piece of Egypt, just pick up your nearest guidebook. Manila however, was something else.

Attending the Southeast Asian Forum on Islam and Democracy (on a sponsored trip, I might add) was an attendance that brought home perspective. The forum was near irrelevant for me, but it was the side dishes and the room slippers that left its effect. The virginal experience of being on my own in a foreign country amidst alien elements and contingencies has left me frangible to say the least.

What I may have known to be right could well have been a farce, well disguised among the threads of naivety and bonds of chastity. They say Antony was a good politician for his diplomacy, a characteristic that has well dissolved on the flight home, 40000 feet in the air and deep in thought. All it took was a throwaway discussion that spawned confusion slivering to the cores, melting the basic institutions of my mental stability into mush. You could drown your head in a bathtub of water but naught would seep out, imprinted perpetually like a tattoo, in places that may one day become recesses of the mind, I wouldn't be able to determine now. Like a paper aeroplane that flies against the laws of engineering, carried by the draft of a zephyr blowing in the opposite direction, unsure of its raison d'etre or its destination.

Such a revelation will leave its mark. What it manifests into, what the scar looks like. But for the first time in as long as i can remember, I discarded impulse for practicality.