Saturday walks to Kovan are my long route on purpose. Lorong Ah Soo to the park connector, then along the path where cyclists overtake walkers with a polite bell. I do not count steps. I count small things: how many laundry poles are full by ten, how many cats watch from stairwell windows, whether the hawker stall I like has its soup pot steaming yet.
The walk takes forty minutes if I stop for nothing and an hour if I stop for everything. Today I stop for everything. A neighbour I only know by lift nods asks about my mother. I say she is well, which is true enough for a corridor conversation. A child rides a scooter in loops around a tree. The loops get tighter, then wider, as if he is learning patience without knowing the word.
At the halfway bench I sit and drink water from a bottle that has been in my bag since Thursday. The label is peeling. Kovan appears as a cluster of roofs before it appears as a street — a trick of elevation on a flat island. I can see rain coming from the west as a grey sheet, but it has not reached me yet. I walk into it anyway because turning back feels like admitting the afternoon is over.
Rain on a park connector is a specific sound — rubber shoes on wet mesh, leaves slapping, someone's podcast leaking from a pocket. I think about bus routes I could take home and reject them. The bus is for tired evenings, not for Saturdays when my legs still believe in distance. My notebook is in a zip bag. The paper survives if I do not drop the bag in a puddle, which I almost do at the underpass.
By the time I reach the Kovan market fringe the rain thins to mist. Fruit stalls put out plastic covers like small awnings. I buy nothing. Buying would turn the walk into an errand and I want it to stay a line on a map I draw in my head. Hougang on one side, Kovan on the other, me in the middle with damp shoes and a sentence half-formed.
On the return I notice a block I usually ignore because it faces away from the path. Today someone has hung four identical shirts on one pole — blue, blue, blue, blue — like a quiet joke about weekdays. I write that down because repetition in the open air feels like poetry without trying.
Back in Lorong Ah Soo my block looks taller from the car park entrance than from my window. Perspective again. The lift lobby smells of soap. I ride up, change socks, and put the notebook on the kitchen counter next to the kettle. The walk is done. The paragraph is not. It never is on Saturdays.
If you need a map for this route, imagine the park connector as a thread between two familiar names. I do not GPS my own neighbourhood. I already live here.
On the last bend before home I count the floors with lights on and invent small stories for the windows that stay dark. Not crime stories — ordinary ones. Someone on holiday. Someone napping through the afternoon. Writing fiction about lit windows is a habit I picked up on these walks.
