I have always been drawn to look up to the sky at night and gaze at the flickering stars. I could stare at them for hours, even if I’ve never begun to know the names of the constellations. It’s the one curiosity that I’ve never allowed myself to satiate, because I’m afraid that once I know what they are called, I would stop wondering what it would be like to meet them in person.

Dear Francis of the future, whatever year you choose or happen to read this again,

Today, September 28 of 2015, was a day you decided to not do anything. You don’t have a job, a real one anyway, one that society deemed the kind of job everyone should get, like a desolate cubicle where you smash away at the keys, filing paperwork for people you’ve never really known or met, where you wear your suit and tie even if no one is looking, much less cared. You used to work for one these kinds of workplaces albeit more alive and less funded and you could wear your plain t-shirts. It was a humanitarian organization and you told yourself for most of your life that you would work for these people so you could feel more connected to the world you so desperately craved to stay away from. After nine months of smashing away at the keys (that never seemed to complain about being smashed or reprimanded), you still feel empty and unaccomplished and for some reason, you feel less and less connected to other people and you’ve become more intoxicated with the concept of socializing with strangers.

I think for a lot of people, international travel is a once-in-a-lifetime event, a YOLO moment—fleeting, temporary, and momentarily purposeful. But travel is my life and my life is travel. Travel is no different to me than cooking is a chef’s lifework or sports is an athlete’s daily strive to go on living.

But even then, I remain astonished by the wonders of foreign land. Singapore is a spectacle. The urban planning is almost flawless and intricately designed. Its people are the most helpful I’ve met. With a map in my hands and a scrunched up look on my face, they would come up to me and ask me if I’m lost and if I need any help with directions. It’s happened too often that I’ve concluded it’s simply in their nature to be nice to people.

The taxi driver was listening to the FM radio on a non-social volume. He was driving with the rhythm of the screaming man in the station booth, while I had to bear with him shouting his frustrations about the local government.

It made me think about how shallow the FM person was (I refuse to call him a news anchor, not even anchor, or any form of media deference because he was full of shitty credibility, if any). But more so, I thought about how similar we were in our plight for social justice and our innate hatred towards capitalism. He screamed his issues while I wrote mine, but we were putting as many exclamation points as possible to try to get our opinions across. I thought about how futile and ineffective the method of discussion was and how, despite all the sweaty, bloody, seemingly important ways we tried to make people listen and act, we are still here, whining about the world, and people hearing us because of our volume, but not listening to us because of the gravity of our cause.

I think I destroyed you. I’ve told myself countless of times that a million other factors could have definitely weighed in the process of your destruction. But you know how I lie to myself as often as I can just to keep the pieces of my soul together.

I know you once had dreams, big ones, ones that are unselfish and ambitious and sometimes unfathomable, and I still wish you do. I wish, that during the time when I couldn’t hold my life in my two hands and pushed you inside a lonely perspective of the world, I wish that you still have your dreams. And that when you managed to climb out of the hole, you had your dreams with you to tell you where to go from there.

I don’t think I’ll apologize for everything that’s happened between us, because I think that I once believed I was right and now I believe I’m not and I would surely sound like a hypocrite and you’ve stopped believing in, even listening to, even bothering with me. But I’ll try because I think you deserve that, and definitely more.