My neighbour's radio plays old songs through the wall in the afternoon — not loud enough to complain about, not soft enough to ignore. I never see the radio. I only hear it through plaster and a shared corridor pipe that carries sound like a reluctant messenger. Today it was a ballad I half recognise from my mother's kitchen in another decade.
I paused chopping vegetables and listened without meaning to. The fan in my corridor was on its lowest setting, pushing air past the door gap. Together — radio, fan, knife on the board — the flat had a rhythm that felt borrowed from an older Singapore. Not nostalgia, just acoustics.
I do not know my neighbour well. We nod at the lift. Once he held the door when my hands were full of mail. His radio taste suggests he favours melodies with long held notes and short apologies in the lyrics. I respect that. My playlist is mostly silence and bus noise recorded by accident.
When the song ended, the radio did not switch off. Another programme began — talk, maybe, in a language I do not follow completely. The cadence alone was enough to keep me company while I wiped the counter. Living alone is not loneliness every hour. Sometimes it is a radio through a wall reminding you that other kitchens exist on the same floor.
I wrote a line in the notebook about the fan and the wall together, then crossed out the word that sounded too much like a slogan. Personal blogs fail when they chase a lesson. I am describing a corridor at four in the afternoon, not offering a programme.
Later, in the lift, I smelled soap — Tuesday cleaning, perhaps — and thought about how the building shares more than pipes. It shares timing. Laundry days. Radio hours. The flick of switches at roughly the same evening minute when people return from work along different routes but reach the same lobby.
The radio stopped before six. Silence after prolonged faint music feels like a room changing shape. I opened my window a finger-width for air and heard a bus brake downstairs. Normal estate sound. I prefer it to the idea of total quiet, which never actually arrives in Hougang anyway.
If my neighbour reads this, thank you for the songs. I will not knock to ask for the station name. Some borders between flats should stay polite and thin.
I have tried to describe the wall without making it a metaphor for anything larger than plaster. It is simply a surface that passes sound when the volume is right and the fan is low. The corridor outside my door is narrow enough that every footstep is audible, yet I rarely look through the peephole unless the lift dings twice in a row.
At five-thirty the radio returned — same channel, different song, same volume. I chopped onions for dinner and matched my knife rhythm to the melody without thinking. Shared timing is one way neighbours coexist without exchanging names every week.
Later I wrote the time in the corner of the page — sixteen hundred hours — because precision matters when sound is the subject.
