Morning walks to the bus stop with Quinn— she’s holding her chestnuts, pretending to be blown around by the wind, exclaiming that it is blowing into her mouth, that it’s fluttering my hair. On the bus, she looks out the window, draws, lies down, nuzzles into my lap.
*
Why did taking the bus give me so much anxiety before? The insulation of a ride-share feels safer, just the breaths of the driver and myself. Being near the bodies of others, trapped on a moving vehicle—my breath seizes and that ripple of panic. Too much. Unsafe. But the despairing familiarity of cars— Ubering to and fro imposing marble buildings. Desolate New England skies, vague inner dread. Nothing to look forward to.
Bus rides now: the rattling, the swaying. Joo Chiat. Siglap. Bedok. The scenery even seems different, though the view’s the same from a car. The gentle heave and sighing lurch.
*
I walked with Quinn to the bus stop, and she ate breakfast on the way. The early morning air bracing. The bus jerks and belches. I checked my email while Quinn occupied herself with her hat. On the way home, I read the poetry collection From Walden to Woodlands, a local interfaith initiative. I penned down in an old pocket-notebook, a gift from someone forgotten: “reading Singlit poetry while on a bus—slowly going through the landscape (Do I feel more local like this?)”
Poetry is a medium well-suited for long bus rides. Reading while on a moving vehicle makes me ill, out of sorts. But with poetry, I can pause, think, breathe, start, restart. I particularly enjoyed Aaron Lee’s “First Light”, since I have been waking early to enjoy the dawn in solitude. Lee: “At this time of day/ the earth questions itself”; and “A fall of bright light makes/ its way to the ground,/ while the words/ trickle inside, flood me with its slow clasp and conviction.” Another line that stood out to me lay in Desmond Kon’s “Earth Shapes”; the persona’s grandfather wanted a meditation garden to help him contemplate, to “ease into the natural order of things”—perhaps the unarticulated principle undergirding life lately. As opposed to trying to adhere to how I feel the world needs to be; anxiety's dictations.
My relationship to ‘time’ lately has changed. I still feel that a forty or fifty minute bus ride is “long”, but not “too long”. Or maybe I don’t feel the familiar, hysterical imperative that “I’m unsafe unless I’m home” anymore.
*
Bus-ride with Quinn. We played “I spy”. On the journey back, I read Toh Hsien Min’s Means to an End, my very first purchase by a local writer. (Singlit is such a tuneful name for a ‘national literature’.) I alternate between reading poetry and looking out of the window. Commuting is, right now, an unhurried way of soaking in, inhabiting the fact that I am back in this country, and how peaceful, how comforting, to know where one’s home is, even as I’m trying to understand what it means to be home, fill in its colors and shades. An unhurried, peaceful life full of books and friends and slow walks. The absence of rushing, the world slowing down to content days in the sun, in this house that has and still loves me, that waited years for our return.
*
A longer commute by bus means I am listening to more music. I have been listening to unearthly, Gothic electronica quaverings about tortured love— Alan Walker’s “Faded”, Agnes Obel’s “Familiar”, Lisa Hannigan's "Snow", Woodkid's "I Love You", Eurille’s “Hate Me”. How many years has it been since I broadened my musical tastes?
*
Poet Mark Strand’s commentary on Edward Hopper’s paintings in Hopper: “When I was a child what I saw of the world beyond my immediate neighborhood I saw from the backseat of my parents’ car. It was a world glimpsed in passing. It was still. It had its own life and did not know or care that I happened by at a particular time. Like the world of Hopper’s paintings, it did not return my gaze.” I read this and lo, obliquely; the landscape of Singapore; familiar yet disinterested, the reminder of my smallness, how I am one of many, a humility borne from harsh truths and dispassionate shopping malls, as the bus rattles tirelessly by.
*
The melancholic solitude when I find myself the only passenger on the upper deck of a bus. The illusion that it is just the driver and I. The lonely serenity of Chihiro and No-Face on a train smoothly running on water. Note to self: Next time I find myself alone on the upper deck, play Joe Hisaishi’s “The Sixth Station”.
*
I got caught in the rain sending Quinn to school, and sat drenched in the cold air-conditioned bus home. From the top deck of the bus, I saw E standing in the rain, on her phone. “why were you standing in the rain??” I texted. “i was waiting for you!” she said, gently soaked while I ran away from her, chasing solitude, boarding the bus without looking back.
*
The last bus ride home: no music, looking out the window, noticing the movement of thought. The abandoned house near Wallich Road, with its sprawling compound, empty, shriekful; curious about its exterior, curious why the whole stretch of road is filled with unusually large, abandoned buildings. And blink; this weekend’s pool party, imagining bending down to look at R’s new baby, who she will be babywearing. Passing the shophouses at Katong—going through potential dinner dapao places. Imagining going to swim with Quinn at the pool, teaching Beng how to tread water— blink; thinking of easy-going T, wondering if she has recovered, whether she is still in pain—flash to Y’s message after we met “you always know how to love me best”, thinking about her pregnancy, how she’s so close to having a baby, a real baby; and am transported to us at A’s place, rehearsing, “So A, how have you been?” Y in her shapeless black dress. My attention snags on a tree, a shopfront—and the bus has reached Siglap, and I’m thinking of D’s tight dress and her small waist and her makeup and her smooth skin and thinking of the way she makes people feel; at ease and she is open and soft and how jealous I am of that easy way she carries herself even though I’m sure I do not know the troubles she has. You imitate her so well; mouthing beneath my face mask some iconic Mei phrases “girl, I don’t wanna talk about it”, with chin chucked high, self-deprecating twist of the mouth. Imagining W in love again. Wanting to talk to him, yet wanting to stay away, his language sometimes too overwhelming for me... And myself? Imagining myself going to Archipelago, and doing my work, the phrase I am reminding myself to write down; “chest expander reconstruction”. And trickling in from the back of my head, a love song—
Realizing that my mind during the trip was occupied by friends and people around me. How humbling, what a privilege. Those cold, desiccated years in America; the scarcity of companions to think about, care for, fantasize about. Just Beng and Quinn, and I, spine curved, letting the days roll by. Now, how humbling, how wonderful it is to have a community, can I even say a “beloved community”? It took a year of getting used to everyone, a year of grinding teeth and adjusting to carrying other people’s concerns, practicing turning them over and over in my mind, exercising both easy platitudes and heartfelt talk.
*
It was raining and I was on the bus home and I listened to Jay Chou, obviously. Because rain + bus + music inevitably means going back, back, back—back to the early years of aimlessness and longing and figuring myself out through music. Wanting to capture that feeling again, something about it so pure, so unadulterated. Not in a hurry to grow up, nor to mature. And then— listened to songs from Coldplay’s 2008 Viva La Vida. I would have been eighteen. Just entering university. The joy, the drama. The triumph. "No I don’t want a battle from beginning to end/ I don’t want a cycle of recycled revenge/ I don’t wanna follow Death and all of his friends."
*
“Let’s take the long way home.” What a tender thing to say. Prolonging the time spent together, enjoying each other’s company. We read, hands entwined. We lean on each other, napping. A thigh casually thrown over your lap. The bus brings us steadily home.
I love seeing plants growing on top of bus stops. Bus stops are liminal spaces, means to an end, pit stops for transition. Seeds settle there, sprout, lay roots, make an accidental home permanent.
*
Bus rides home are a daily practice of daydreaming.
Music in my ears, I let my mind drift off, to whatever it wants to indulge in. Lots of soft hip hop, soft rap, soft dance tracks. I don’t know the names of these genres and find that I don’t care. Outkast, Tinashe, Robin Schultz, Wiz Khalifa.
And then, alighting, pulling my earphones away, hit by the stunning sound of reality, at once silent but so loud.