I am convinced it is 124 until the plate says otherwise. This happens to me with bus numbers the way it happens with names at reunions — certainty first, correction second, humility third. The stop outside my block is shaded in the morning by a tree that drops small hard fruits nobody collects. I stand there with a notebook in my bag and too much confidence for someone who has mixed up digits since childhood.
The bus arrives and it is not 124. It is the right route with the wrong number in my head, or the right number with the wrong route in my head — at this point the distinction feels academic. I raise my hand too late. The driver opens the door anyway. Not wide drama, just the hydraulic sigh and a tilt of the head that means get in or do not, but decide. I get in because Balestier was the plan and pride is heavier than a wrong integer.
Inside smells of detergent and warm plastic. An auntie holds a wet umbrella though the rain has stopped — a habit, not an error. I sit near the middle because the front feels like volunteering for conversation and the back feels like hiding. The driver pulls away smoothly, which is its own kind of courtesy in a city where jerks are a language. I watch the estate slide past: void deck tables empty, laundry poles like quiet flagpoles, the corridor gate at someone else's block clicking as we pass.
I tell myself I will memorise the correct number this time. I say it under my breath twice. By the time we reach Balestier I have already transposed a digit. Some minds are like that — excellent at paragraphs, unreliable at integers. My father laughed about it without cruelty. My teachers did not laugh. Somewhere between those two responses I learned to write things down instead of trusting recall.
At the five-foot-way I buy nothing and walk anyway, which is the Balestier version of a pilgrimage for people who like shade and old tiles. A shop sells lamps I do not need. A clinic sign repeats opening hours in three languages. I note a sentence about the fan sound in a shophouse window — metal on slow, a tick I could use later — and I do use it later, here, which is either discipline or inability to leave observations alone.
The return bus is the one I should have remembered. I board without theatre. The same driver is not on this shift; kindness is not always serial. At my stop I thank the driver out of reflex and he nods the way people nod when the transaction is complete. Back upstairs the notebook opens on the bone table. I write the correct number at the top of the page in large numerals like a primary-school punishment, then cross it out because shame is not the tone I want in this nest.
What stays is simpler: a city that moves even when you misremember, and a door that opens if you are one beat late, and a tree that keeps dropping fruit nobody collects, and the fact that I can walk from Whampoa to Balestier and back in a morning without needing the day to mean more than that. The scrap ends here, one sitting, kopi still cooling on the counter downstairs.