I am still in town when the evening turns proper — not the polite dusk of the office blocks, but the heavier kind that settles over the older lanes near Chin Swee. I have eaten late, somewhere near Outram, and I am walking toward the MRT because the bus would mean waiting and I am not in a waiting mood. The air smells of rain that has not yet decided to fall. My shoes are quiet on the pavement. I have a page folded in my pocket and I keep touching the corner without meaning to.
51 Chin Swee Road is not where I live. I live on Jalan Rajah, in Whampoa, in a flat where the table sits by the window and the fan stays on one. Tonight I am crossing through a part of the city I know only in fragments — the kopitiam I passed once with my uncle, the stairwell that smells of detergent, the corridor gate that clicks the way ours does at home. I am heading north-west in my head, though my feet are taking the practical route to the station. The map in my phone is unnecessary. I have walked this direction before, just never on a night quite like this one.
The first thing I notice is not visual. It is sound — thin at first, then layering. Sirens, more than one, coming from somewhere I cannot yet place. Not close enough to feel urgent in my chest, but close enough that the street feels briefly rearranged, as if everyone has stepped one pace to the side. I stop at a junction I do not know the name of. The traffic light changes and nobody seems to care in the usual way. A delivery rider checks his phone and moves on. I stay where I am, which is the far side, looking across.
From here I can see light — blue-white pulses reflected on wet metal and glass, a wash of it moving between buildings about two blocks away, maybe three. I am bad at distance at night. Always have been. My father used to say I could remember a bus number wrongly and still arrive on time, which was his way of teasing me without cruelty. I think of that now because I am trying to measure how far the lights are from me, and I cannot. The important thing is that I cannot see details. I cannot see faces. I cannot see what happened. I see brightness where brightness should not be ordinary, and I see the stillness of people who have also stopped without knowing why they have stopped.
Someone asks whether I am all right. I say yes before the question fully lands — a reflex, not a lie exactly, but not the whole truth either. I am all right in the sense that I am standing, breathing, not in anyone's way. I am not all right in the smaller sense that my hands have gone slightly cold and the folded page in my pocket feels foolish. What would I write down? The colour of the light? The number of sirens? The way the junction smells of exhaust and something sweet from a bakery that should have closed an hour ago?
I wait longer than I need to. I tell myself I am waiting for the light, but the light has cycled twice. A woman beside me murmurs into her phone — not to me — and I catch only the tone, low and careful. I do not listen for words. That feels like a line I should not cross, even now, even when everything in me wants a sentence to hold. I have learned that wanting a sentence is not the same as being entitled to one.
When I walk again, it is slowly. The sirens fade and return and fade again, the way sound behaves when buildings get in the way. I pass a bus stop where someone has left a kopi cup on the bench, untouched, as if the owner forgot it in a hurry. I do not pick it up. I think about the river park near my flat, how empty it is before six in the morning, how the path smells after rain — and I think about how far this junction is from that peace, though it is only a train ride and a short walk. Cities compress distance until something happens and then distance returns all at once.
I reach the MRT entrance without remembering the last few minutes clearly. That bothers me later, when I am home and the kettle has boiled twice and the window is open and the fan clicks on its lowest setting. I write a line, then cross it out. I write another. The table is bone-coloured in the lamplight. Outside, Whampoa is quiet in the way it usually is after midnight — not silent, never silent, but layered with small domestic sounds. I do not know what happened near Chin Swee. I know only what I heard from the far side of a junction, and what I saw when seeing was not enough, and how I walked home carrying the ordinary weight of an evening that refused to stay ordinary.
I still do not know.
That is the honest part, and I would rather leave it there than pretend otherwise. If you were nearby and remember differently, tell me. I will listen. I will correct what I got wrong. But I will not invent what I did not see.