A tiny blip in the continuum

A fighter jet screams past somewhere above, its supersonic boom rippling deep into this concrete valley I am in right now. Minutes later, a barrage of fireworks goes off, its thunderous echoes punctuating the incessant growls of rush hour traffic.

The assortment of squat, stocky buildings around me is a visual record of local architecture. Most of the buildings still look the same, as though not a day has gone by since the ’70s and ’80s, while a handful of them have since undergone major facelifts to varying degrees of success. The result is an awkward mesh of contradictions.

Standing shoulder to shoulder, they line the main thoroughfare in facing rows interrupted at regular intervals by narrow streets arranged in a strict grid. The streets bear the names of historical figures whose importance escapes me. Seah. Purvis. Liang Seah. Tan Quee Lan. In trying to remember, and utterly failing, I feel a compulsion to read up on them. Funny how one’s appreciation of history grows only with age — well, for me any way.

I have a special affection for this place. It resembles what I have always envisaged a city to be like, a place where traffic courses heavily through its tar-black arteries, and buildings perched so precariously close I have to weave around parked cars and sidestep passers-by on non-existent footpaths. The lack of greenery and public housing in immediate sight helps the illusion, I think.

But what really compels me to revisit this area again and again are the events in my life which had taken place here across the years, events that continue to haunt me. They unfold, a street here, a backlane there, as I weave in and out of the long shadows cast by these buildings.

Here is where I further my education by trawling store after store filled with old, forgotten books and unearthing countless gems. Where I am most comfortable being at. Where I can be me.

Here is where you and I traded looks even while she was sitting next to me. You intrigued me.

Here is where you and I idled the afternoon away and somehow managed a fluid conversation even though we didn’t really know each other all that well.

Here is where you and I, spent and weak-knee and raw from hours of fucking, traversed many times on our way to the convenience store in the dead of the night, when the only sounds are of traffic lights chirping urgently to no one and empty taxis cruising past.

Here is where I never fail to glance up at that ultra chic establishment every time I pass by because it serves as a reminder of the dichotomy of who you desperately want to be and who you really are.

Here is where I felt, heavy in my pocket, the object that could very well incriminate me forever. I shouldn’t have, but I did any way.

Above all, here is where my heart cracks a little more with each visit, and where I become so moved that words flow effortlessly from mind to paper, my hand possessed by the ghosts of the life I have long since renounced.