The bus home was half empty — the good kind of half empty where you can take a window seat without performing a negotiation with bags and knees. I had visited a friend near Bedok and started back late enough that the sun was gone but the streetlights had not fully committed. The route rolls through familiar names in an order that feels like a lullaby if you have heard it for years.
I sat on the warm vinyl — still warm from whoever left before me — and watched the window fog at the edges where my shoulder touched glass. The seat remembered someone else's body heat. Buses are public but intimate in small ways. You inherit a temperature and a view for twenty stops.
An auntie boarded at a stop I do not know the name of and tapped her card with the confidence of a person who has made this trip on every Thursday since a fixed date in history. A student fell asleep against the pole and woke exactly one stop before mine, as if his body kept its own map. I read three pages of a paperback someone else left on the seat — no, that is fiction. I looked out the window instead.
Hougang approached as lighting changes — more HDB blocks, more lit windows, more laundry poles like short flags. Lorong Ah Soo is not a dramatic arrival. It is a turn the driver takes without announcing. I stand one stop early sometimes to walk the last stretch and clear my head. Tonight I stayed on until the bus sighed to a halt and the doors opened with a hydraulic exhale.
Walking from the bus stop to my block takes four minutes. I know the cracks in the pavement by heart. A cat watched from under a car, eyes catching lamp light. The void deck had its usual plastic chairs stacked for cleaning. Someone had left a flyer on my letterbox door — the one that never shuts flush — and I folded it into my bag to recycle upstairs.
In the lift I checked my reflection and looked tired in the honest way, not the cinematic way. The mirror is slightly scratched near the bottom. I have written about that scratch before in a draft I never posted. Scratches are private until they are not.
Home smelled like the ginger I left in a bowl. I switched on the kitchen light and the day officially ended. The bus seat warmth was gone from my clothes, but the ride remained as a small recorded fact: half empty, window side, route I could draw from memory if asked.
That is all this scrap wants to be — a bus ride home without a crisis, without a revelation. Ordinary transport on an ordinary evening. I am fond of those notes precisely because they refuse to be more than they are.
Before I alighted I pressed my palm to the window glass and felt the vibration of the engine travel up my wrist — a small reminder that the city moves even when the carriage feels paused at a red light. Lorong Ah Soo waited at the end of the route like a familiar sentence.
