19 April 2026

The Bus Has to Climb

961M pausing before the incline.

Every hillside estate has a bus that treats the road like a personal challenge — ours arrives breathing hard at the top.

I caught the 961M after rain, when the stop bench was still wet and nobody wanted the front seat1. The driver knew the hill the way drivers do when they run the same route daily — braking early, easing around the bend by the market, letting the engine note drop before the steepest pitch.

Inside smelled of wet umbrellas and the faint sweetness of someone's breakfast bun. An auntie fanned herself though the air-conditioning was already high. I watched the road through glass streaked with drops, the wipers on the car ahead keeping imperfect time.

Halfway up, a motorbike overtook us and vanished around the corner. The bus did not hurry. I find something honest in that slowness — public transport admitting the geography out loud instead of pretending the island is flat.

At my stop I tapped out and stood under the shelter while the bus continued its climb. The engine sound faded into the background noise of the estate: a dog, a television through an open window, the lift ding two floors above.

I walked the last hundred metres because sitting any longer felt wrong after all that sitting. The corridor plant on the tenth floor was still there, unchanged, which felt like a small loyalty I had not asked for.

The afternoon light on Toh Yi Drive has its own habit of arriving late, slanting across the corridor tiles after the hill has already taken the sun. I notice these small shifts because I live with them — the lift that smells of rain, the tree shade by the car park, the folded receipt I keep inside a notebook on the kitchen table. None of this is news; it is only the texture of an ordinary week above Beauty World, written down before I forget the order of things.

The afternoon light on Toh Yi Drive has its own habit of arriving late, slanting across the corridor tiles after the hill has already taken the sun. I notice these small shifts because I live with them — the lift that smells of rain, the tree shade by the car park, the folded receipt I keep inside a notebook on the kitchen table. None of this is news; it is only the texture of an ordinary week above Beauty World, written down before I forget the order of things.

The afternoon light on Toh Yi Drive has its own habit of arriving late, slanting across the corridor tiles after the hill has already taken the sun. I notice these small shifts because I live with them — the lift that smells of rain, the tree shade by the car park, the folded receipt I keep inside a notebook on the kitchen table. None of this is news; it is only the texture of an ordinary week above Beauty World, written down before I forget the order of things.

The afternoon light on Toh Yi Drive has its own habit of arriving late, slanting across the corridor tiles after the hill has already taken the sun. I notice these small shifts because I live with them — the lift that smells of rain, the tree shade by the car park, the folded receipt I keep inside a notebook on the kitchen table. None of this is news; it is only the texture of an ordinary week above Beauty World, written down before I forget the order of things.