Providence
The one-year anniversary of my moving back passed a few weeks ago with little note. Today, it crept back up to me. I was meeting Alex at the Projector at 5:15pm but I wanted first to drop off two slices of sourdough at my sister’s. There was a direct bus from there that would take only 25 minutes to get to Lavender but I worried I would miss it. I toggled between apps on my phone while I stepped around people on the escalator, feeling increasingly certain I was going to be late. Just as I ascended, eyes up, my bus was there. A word I’d hear later in the movie: Providence.
I imagine the SBS transit system feels like divine care to at least a few hundred people in the country every single day. Today I was one.
It was a double-decker, it was sunset, and I was on my way to the movies with a friend I love – a friend who has seen me there and here, and who knows what it means to go between the two. I sat in the front row on the second level, thinking about my morning. I’d had brunch with my parents, just a very routine one. It was remarkable only when I thought about how much I’d missed this in the years I was away, and how much it still means to me now, as things change. Walking back to the car, my mom held my arm lightly, and I don’t think I realized it then, but it left me happy the rest of the day.
The bus 133 runs a route that is familiar to me. We passed by a store where I’d bought spray paint two weeks ago, a café I tried to work at as a waitress for one and a half days in 2013, and the pottery studio owned by a friend of my mom who used to work in finance but quit to become a potter. My sister and I helped to workshop names for that studio in secondary school, back in the old house, around the round teak table with an overhead lamp that never stopped attracting insects. I know the studio dog, Buddy, who goes everywhere with the two lady potters. They told me once they bring him to the movies in a bag and slip him popcorn.
The light shining through the window was warm. I looked at people crossing the road, walking, cycling. Bougainvillea flaring off the bridges. We passed by Masjid Malabar on the corner of Victoria Street, Singapore’s only Malabar Muslim mosque, opened shortly after the war by Muslim immigrants from southern India. It was beautiful in the light. It all was. I remembered a video I have in my phone from 2015 of walking in Bukit Timah somewhere on an inky blue night trimmed by orange streetlights, and someone muttering, “like Van Gogh painting.” I remembered a text I got once from a friend that I screenshot to save: "You always get back to being happy."
I was lucky to be home, I felt, in a place I knew and that knew me.
I had to walk a little bit when I got off. I went slowly. On the elevator up to the fifth floor, I checked the time – I was early.
This email was written to the soundtrack for the movie Past Lives, and specifically to the song "See You" on repeat.
Love,
Reb