In Cambridge, I am a new woman. Uhh, so to speak. The metaphor shines not in the word “new” but in the word “woman” (because I pinky-swear that I am still a girl). Something odd happens when you move to a country with four seasons and accents that curve in all the different places from yours. As much as we celebrate diversity, we sacrifice things for it. To find common ground, I remould my accent to be better understood and study up on British media. In return, I meet more friends and learn to banter. I download Vinted and start incorporating values previously unknown into the way I think and breathe. In return, I get a fiery internal conflict of epic proportions.

Cambridge is where the 21-year-old me lives, and she dies in the wake of the Easter term. The year ends and I do my annual pilgrimage back to my hometown. Separate from the sacred pilgrimage is the ritual internship, which I’m currently doing at a Singaporean firm brimming with local students. They are funny and kind. They speak in Singaporean accents and joke with Singaporean slang. They are charming and an unbelievably potent glimpse into the person I could’ve been; an alternate life, different years lived by a different body.

“I download Vinted and start incorporating values previously unknown into the way I think and breathe”

The tiny, humid city-state is an altar for my past. I take the bus outside my old school and in the window I catch sight of a 17-year-old me, uniform cleanly pressed and eyes glinting with self-doubt. I walk through a playground where I once had a difficult conversation with a friend, and I can feel the warm breeze of that afternoon and the prick of tears in the corner of my eyes. I pick my sister up from school and hear the sound of my first pair of heels stumbling across tiles during a debate competition. I pass by my preschool and breathe in the mild scent of freshly-cooked rice.

With every morning train ride to the office, staring down the cramped barrel of an infinite future, I dissolve further into my past. I can see this summer stretched out in front of me: gripping handle bars on public transport I can actually reach, eating unbelievably delicious food, letting my accent bend back to the influences of local languages. Remembering the rules of the game, revised – to dress more conservatively, that women must be married by 28, to forgo desire for the good of the collective. The humidity in the air saturates my lungs and reconstitutes my person: the nostalgia, the sounds of the city, the feel of linen against my skin… I inhale them all and feel like a teenager again.

Where did the adult me go? What happened to everything she became?

“We are always taking shards of ourselves into the future”

A while back, I spoke to a friend who had moved from a humanities degree into a more conventional career. Under the perpetual buzz of the air conditioning, we talked about what that change meant to us. I confessed, “I just don’t want to forget”. His response: “Then decide to read the books you want to read. Decide to do the things you want to do. Decide to remember.”

Moving to Cambridge from a place much different does weird things to you. It demarcates your life very neatly into two areas, both cluttered with their own sights, sounds, and tastes. It splits you into two halves: one who doesn’t own any winter clothes, and another who is frequently fighting the urge to needlessly acquire a new pair of boots during lectures.

“Because there is no ‘different person’ – they’re all you”

But, as we all know, there is no real point where the present becomes the past. We can draw these big divisions in our minds – primary school, secondary school, sixth form – but time is relentless and constant, and we are always taking shards of ourselves into the future. That’s why I still hold ideals about filial piety and familial loyalty, and why I yearned for my hometown during my first Michaelmas with so much hunger it felt physical. If we live our lives thinking of ourselves as half a person in two different bodies, we merely distract ourselves from the fact that we have a responsibility, to our past and future selves, to grasp each moment in our hands and choose – choose who we are, and who we want to be.

Cambridge is nice because it’s a place where the sentiments of youth shapeshift into the big and wonderful. You act on stage, you stand up for what you care about, you have life-changing conversations under the stars at 2am as you nervously note that you have so much work to do. But when the mundanity of routine or the limitations of another region press down on you, it becomes time to make hard choices; to distil what of yourself is important enough to grip onto.

I know. It’s lonely to bear the weight of both bodies, and not feel like you belong in either. But I have a Singaporean consolation to offer you – you get two for the price of one? Just kidding. The real consolation is this: this is the way you figure out who you are. This is the way you develop a sense of self which resists varying cultural pressures and stands the test of the mercurial passage of time. This is the way that, one day, you can say that the girl from university you look fondly back on is still the person you are today.

Because there is no ‘different person’ – they’re all you. When the girl who lived through her first full spring returns to Singapore’s eternal summer, she arranges to have local food with her childhood friends and quietly keeps up with theatre news back at the ADC. She texts friends back in Cambridge about how she’s on the plane, and fights the ache in her chest for her family, to whom her soul is tied eternally still. She is both, and all she has met and known, and that only makes her whole.