The places which make us

What we carry with us, what is precious, what forms us, is often geography

- Rohit Brijnath

The building is broken and gone but in her dreams there is neither rubble nor ruin. Everything is intact. Her family's one-bedroom flat, where she lived as a child in the 1960s, was in Queen's Crescent by the railway tracks, and she'd scuttle towards the kitchen window when she heard the first clack of the train. She never made it in time to see it.

Farmers lived close by and came asking for swill to feed their pigs. At Chinese New Year, despite the hardships they encountered, they returned bearing gifts. One year, a live chicken, destined for the dinner table.

My friend AL can't explain her recurring dream but it allows her to touch the past. Even though our memories are like a chipped jug, small bits breaking away in time, some things like that building can never be erased for her. Her father recently died and her mother has dementia but then, in that house, she says with a quiet wistfulness, "they were so young and hopeful".

A bit like Singapore was then I've been thinking about the idea of place since I recently attended the launch of Once Upon A Place. The book is a tidy collection of short memoirs by eight Singaporeans who explore the landscapes they inhabited and were influenced by. As I listened to them speak about a grandmother's house and a father's shophouse, I smiled. Places tug at all of us and who we are often has a favourite address.

"The places we come from," wrote the novelist Aryn Kyle in The God Of Animals, "don't leave us as easily as we leave them." We're not given to pause these days, but occasionally refreshing to examine carry with us, what is precious, where we come from, what made us. Often it is geography.