Of Distances 4
My sense of direction has always been poor. I avoided driving for a whole year after getting my license, simply because I was afraid to make the wrong turn. But those days are long gone, and out of necessity or whim I now scoot all about Singapore, my trusty street directory in hand. Sometimes, I will open it randomly on my bed, look at a denoted cluster of flats in say, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 4, and imagine life there. A school, a market, an MRT station. So much like home.
I especially like those places farthest from where I live, and find my way to these heartlands just so that I can fold their corners into memory. That sleepy block of bedok flats where I visited the physician who placed heated suction cups on my back, so near the reservoir I first stumbled upon, heart-broken, 3 years ago. The reservoir is still peaceful, and I chuckle now at how utterly time excoriates.
Those block of flats in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 4 look like they could be anywhere else - Hougang, or Serangoon, or Yishun, orbiting their own town hubs in a microcosm of local life. The sounds of coffee-shop TV, the smell of their bakeries. Thomson Road, snaking its way to the north, through the routes of my history, through school, houses of old friends, BMT in Neesoon Camp. Those long expressways, especially at night. Racing past Boon Lay after a movie at Jurong Point, to see a dewy mist hover over the vast expanse of shadowy fields and highway lamps.
Compassvale, Sengkang. Impossibly far from Bukit Timah, but my first trip there a year and a half ago started it all, and now I leave by another route at midnight, along Sengkang Avenue 2, past a forlorn train depot, a truncated LRT station called Layar, which suddenly breaks across the water that opens to the north into what must be the Straits of Malacca. The road eventually joins with Jalan Kayu, another old army camp of mine, haunted with ghosts and vanished sun-beached days and 24-hour prata shops, and I could go on and on, but because with this trip I've come full circle, it's here that I'll stop.
I especially like those places farthest from where I live, and find my way to these heartlands just so that I can fold their corners into memory. That sleepy block of bedok flats where I visited the physician who placed heated suction cups on my back, so near the reservoir I first stumbled upon, heart-broken, 3 years ago. The reservoir is still peaceful, and I chuckle now at how utterly time excoriates.
Those block of flats in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 4 look like they could be anywhere else - Hougang, or Serangoon, or Yishun, orbiting their own town hubs in a microcosm of local life. The sounds of coffee-shop TV, the smell of their bakeries. Thomson Road, snaking its way to the north, through the routes of my history, through school, houses of old friends, BMT in Neesoon Camp. Those long expressways, especially at night. Racing past Boon Lay after a movie at Jurong Point, to see a dewy mist hover over the vast expanse of shadowy fields and highway lamps.
Compassvale, Sengkang. Impossibly far from Bukit Timah, but my first trip there a year and a half ago started it all, and now I leave by another route at midnight, along Sengkang Avenue 2, past a forlorn train depot, a truncated LRT station called Layar, which suddenly breaks across the water that opens to the north into what must be the Straits of Malacca. The road eventually joins with Jalan Kayu, another old army camp of mine, haunted with ghosts and vanished sun-beached days and 24-hour prata shops, and I could go on and on, but because with this trip I've come full circle, it's here that I'll stop.