Mark 02 · Serangoon

Lorong Chuan, with the wind turned

Rain leaves the garden path shining in a way that makes every leaf look newly invented, and I walk slower than necessary because the light will not stay this soft for long.

Serangoon Gardens benches keep their shade even when the sun returns, as if they negotiated permanent umbrellas with the trees during some season I missed.

The path toward Lorong Chuan bends where canal wind turns and brings diesel and pandan in the same breath, which is Singapore smell poetry if you stop judging mixtures.

Puddles hold sky fragments that break when bicycles pass, and I try not to step on the fragments because destruction feels too easy on a morning meant for noticing.

An older man walks a dog that has seen more of this neighbourhood than I have despite my longer residency, and the dog stops at the same lamp post every day without fail.

I think about Chin Swee only briefly — how rain can make different districts rhyme without merging them — then return to the bend where lorong meets canal.

Footsteps on wet brick sound like quiet applause for nobody, which is the kind of metaphor I allow myself once per mark before editing it out later.

Climbing the slight rise toward Upper Serangoon Road reminds me that Serangoon is not flat in the emotional sense even when maps pretend otherwise.

I pause at the bend photo spot where canopy shadow makes a temporary room, and a secondary image from another week shows the same bend under clearer sky.

Walking back, I carry no purchases, only sentences, which is the lightest shopping a person can do on a Saturday that still feels productive.