So many things have changed since my last post, that I don't quite know how to begin.

For one, I've got a new job! I call it part-time, but actually it's full-time—except it's going to last for a month. Until December 8, to be exact, which also happens to be the Feast of the Immaculate Conception haha. I'm so medieval, I measure my days in liturgical terms.

Not sure how I've been doing though. The first two weeks were positively agonising. Something like walking into class on your first day of school and finding out that everyone is already the best of friends and you're trying to slot yourself in and find your place in the group, and everything is so new and fragile and tenuous.

Honestly, the last time I felt like that was when I was 15 and instead of making friends, slunk off to the library during recess and gorged on books. Pretending that I was feeding my brain instead of loneliness. Possibly it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I discovered Jane Austen and Tennessee Williams and read books I would never otherwise have thought of reading.

But anyway, ate lunch with my new colleagues everyday and remained very very very quiet because I didn't know what to say. And perhaps I still don't know what to say and I feel the depression of my tongue again and again, the weight of words and the finicky, precise choices I cannot make. In the end I ask questions.

It was on one of those uncomfortable days last week when they went off for lunch and invited me to join them. But I said no thank you, because there was a sense that they needed to rant about the meeting behind us and the day sprawled on long and languid ahead of us. I told them I needed to be alone for a while, to recharge, and they were absolutely lovely about it, because they understood. And so I had my lunch alone, and I savoured every mouthful.

That's the funny thing about eating in silence. You're so much more reverent, so much more conscious of the food set before you, the measure of salt, the delightful, slimy-chewy texture of squid, the fresh green of spinach, the sweetness of hot, white rice, the smoky after-burn of spice on the tongue. It becomes a prayer. Thank you God for the food before me whose goodness can only hint at the infinite goodness that you are.

Anyway, was planning to head to Cathedral or any of the churches in the downtown area when I whipped out my phone to go somewhere I could be quiet and just sit in the stillness when I realised that the Church of the Sacred Heart was a 10 minute walk away from me according to Google.

It was a hot day with breeze, and I was so happy because I hadn't realise that God was so nearby. I could reach him by walking. A 10 minute pilgrimage, and he'd be there waiting for me. Beyond the bougainvillea hanging over my head and the short rows of apartment buildings from the 1960s, he was there. A mynah hopped into church as I knelt in the pew, the afternoon outside, and fans turning their heads in slow, rhythmic motion. It looked around curiously, like a tourist, and hopped back out politely without making a sound. And I thought, how peaceful.

Somebody once said that peace is not the absence of something, but the presence of someone. And that was it, in the 10 minutes I spent in the quiet of church listening to the shushing of my heart, I walked out refreshed and at peace.