Q

When i’m on a vacation, especially as a child, i find myself in a very particular mood-state. This is where language fails me with its clunky inability to condense nuanced specificity… i’ll label this overarching mood as “suspension”.  What i feel is a blend of quiet, surreal thrill, a disjunct from everyday life that is at once uncomfortable yet pleasant – thrown into the mix is a good dose of homesickness. It is potently contradictory and overall, can be quite disturbing if i weren’t distracted by vacation activities.

I’m very prone to homesickness — i feel like this should be qualified as a possible basis of my weird emotion tumult to what should be every kid’s favorite time of the year. I get immensely homesick everywhere and anytime possible: sleepovers, holidays, camps… in fact i even get homesick at home. And by homesick, i don’t merely mean missing the physical space of my house. By homesick, i mean a terrible toxic cauldron of unfamiliarity and displacement gurgling inside, telling me i’m not where i should be, that this place has no place for me, that i should be somewhere else except i don’t know where that is.

For some inexplicable reason, i’ve been hurled into a quicksand of suspension since a few days ago. I’ve gotten that before: in Sec 3, for a period of time i felt vividly like i did back in primary school. It’s difficult to describe because “Qing in Primary School” is not a qualitative emotion, but that was exactly how i felt. Sometimes i enjoyed it, because i felt (superficially) carefree – other times, specifically when i’m reminded of how i’m not in primary school, it was just immensely oppressive.

Basically, what i feel now is “Qing on a vacation when she was 11”.

Which is problematic because i am not. I’m not 11, I’m not who i was back then, i could never go on a vacation in the same terms and context as i used to. It’s the mood-state of suspension with a stab of nostalgia and the pervasive knowledge of loss: that my childhood, that period of my life, cannot be replicated. It’s like a ghost of an emotion haunting me, if that even makes sense. If ghost is too trite a term, i should maybe call it a poltergeist: it mocks whoever i am not and don’t have now.

It’s pretty bad, except subtly so. Which is worse. My immediate emotions derived from the suspension mood-state juxtaposes with my secondary, underlying one – derived from understanding of my current self and context. How do i justify the underlying discomfort to my immediate feelings of dream-like suspension?

I want it to go away. I guess it is better to live in the present, whether it’s relatively more or less pleasant than the past.