“These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.”

– Red, from the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’

Suddenly, it seems that there’s a white and empty boulevard ahead of me, and every tick of the clock resonates loudly.

I’ll be disrupting from my national service the week after, and starting school another week past that. From now until next Thursday, I’m clearing what leave and off I have accumulated over the course of this year.

It’s a strange feeling having so much free time all of a sudden. There’s no one to yell at you about where you’re supposed to be, what is it you’re supposed to do, and what is it you’ve supposedly done wrong. It is as if I’ve been kept in cold store for the past two years, and now I’ve been violently ejected out of it.

I’ve made myself adequately clear in the past how I disliked my period of military service, and the negativity of the experiences I had. Now that I’m outside, or almost outside of the system, I miss it. It is a routine that I’ve initially hated, but gradually grown accustomized to it, to the point where it becomes the norm.

It’s a strange world, isn’t it?