high up beautiful

seeing Singapore from high up kinda puts things into perspective. makes me think that Singapore is some kind of beautiful, some kind of special. makes me smile at how beautiful things are from a million miles up in the sky, when you can't see the mundane details that're even ugly. everything is just a mish-mash of colours, all blending into a breathtaking blur of lights and shapes. the boundless landscape stretching over the horizon tugs at my mind's eye, leading me to imagine that maybe i could be boundless too, just as the city before me is. i feel small, yes, but i feel so unfathomably free at the same time.

up, up, up we went, barely noticing the ascent. the only thing that gives away my slow climb upwards is the increasing span of the lit-up city i can see. the ugly, awkward trucks and vans that i initially am faced with gives way to beautiful orange lights crawling across the crisscrossing highways. suddenly from where i am, the details don't matter anymore. everything makes up the big picture that i see, contributing to the snaking trail of lights across the dark landscape, like the gleaming scales of a serpent - each unbearably ugly when you stare closeup, but so beautiful as the patterned skin of the snake. i like tiny pinpricks of light better than when i can see the lamp that spits the light out from its ugly mechanisms. i like it blurred, undetailed, unmessy - just beautiful. things are usually so ugly closeup; the details complicate things, mars the pristine condition of the picture-perfect gloss that almost everything has.

like happy families, they seem like happy families from a distance - loving parents, beautiful, clever children racing on to succeed in life. but when you get too close, get to know each individual member of the loving family too well - you realise that the father is heavily in debt and depressed, the mother is extremely insecure about everything in life and this takes a toll on the family; the older child is too much like her mother and hates herself for that, covering up her insecurities with perceived cleverness and pretty clothes, the younger child wants to do everything but manages to do nothing at all. just a random example, but too many 'perfect' families are like that up close.

things are most usually so much prettier from faraway. details complicate, create a mess. it all make perfect sense, how some writers romanticise life by constantly drawing in the bigger picture of Life After Death, putting on some meaning to life, or writing things in epic scale. then, some writers want to portray the "ugly reality" of life, dragging in sordid details in families, individual angst, day-to-day hardships. to make things beautiful, all you have to do is look at them from faraway, from high up - the details disappear and all you see is a collage of colours. when you get back to ground level, everything becomes indescribably ugly and inane all over again, crowding your mind out.

i like it better from high up. maybe - just maybe - one day, i'll really fly.