It didn't take us long enough to reach the airport. It was a morning rush - I forgot my MP3 player that I left to charge the night before, so I thought "Shucks!" No more airplane enjoyment.
We reached the airport, where I kept telling myself, the old me is going to die in Vietnam, and the new me being born within me when I get back to Singapore. It should, it will, and it must show.
To be honest, I was both ready to die both physically and mentally when I sat on the plane. I mean, shit happens all the time. No more problems plagueing me anymore, no more pressure to get into medical school, no more threats of being chased out of the house if I took my water baptism, no more homework, no more negativities of life anymore...
But what the hell, that only happens if I die. There's a whole lot more things to do in life, and I wasn't about to kick my own bucket just like that before I start doing the Lord's work. There's no way anyone's gonna convince me to die just like that willingly, wasting 17 years of my life down the drain by some misadventure or some sort. Everyone has to face all these problems anyway, and the cowardly way to deal with it is to die, commit suicide, end your life, etc. I ain't about to do just that - it's just such a friggin' waste.
Enough about all that morbid thought, I'll come back to that later. There's a whole lot of things left for me to learn about Vietnam. The question of being the tourist or traveller. The question of the meaning of life. The question of which one reigns supreme - the mind or the physical ability?
You get the idea - there's just lots of questions which would have been left unanswered if I didn't go down that trip to Vietnam. I had to answer all these questions myself - or leave myself hanging in the air without a clue why I chose to go to Vietnam, defeating its purpose of self-discovery.
Now, back to the main story. I reached the airport at 7am, mainly because my father still had to rush off to pick up his customers in his Limo2000 taxi, which was perfectly understandable, considering the financial situation of my family. We weren't that well-off, we didn't have iPhones, we didn't have a PlayStation 3 to talk about. At least he had the thought of sending me to the airport, and leaving the rest of the sending off to my mother and my sister, Brenda.
It was my virgin flight - don't laugh! It sure isn't funny to have rest of my peers in the Lao Cai expedition group laugh at not having sat inside an airplane before in my entire life. Try living in poverty, and see why I'm against laughing at this fact.
And I thought this was poverty in Singapore. The trip challenged everything that I thought was going to be my life philosophy from then on.
That aside, I had to leave my beloved mother who has always been the major breadwinner of the family, and my sister who has yet to mature and think of the things around her. I can't die there - I've got a family to protect, a family to teach, and a family to bring pride to. I have to survive that, come what may.
And boy, I treasure family time a lot. At that same, familiar McDonald's at Terminal 2, I told my mom about the stuff that I'd be facing - lots of villager lifestyle, no Internet, not even a call back home at worst. I told both my sister and her to take care while I was away. I made that promise to them - I had to come back, dead or alive.
With them leaving the airport before I went inside the departure hall, undeniably I was quite sad. Other parents sent them all the way into the departure hall, while I was left alone down there. There must be a purpose to this, I thought, as I went in alone anyway.
No, I wasn't alone. I was with my friends, whom I would start calling brothers and sisters after the entire trip with all its experiences through thick and thin.
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