Blue lights on a road I usually skip
I was coming back from Segar Market with a bag of oranges that rolled to the bottom and bruised themselves without my help. The plan had been to cut through Bukit Panjang and be home before the second shower — the one you can smell before it arrives.
Instead I went east. A friend had left a book at a coffeeshop near Outram and I said I would collect it on my way back from an appointment I will not name here because it is dull. Chin Swee Road appeared on my map like a straight line between two places I understood. I did not understand what was waiting there.
The first siren was distant. The second was not. I slowed at a crossing and watched an ambulance turn without its horn — just the lights, which looked almost gentle against the grey flats. People stood on the five-foot way in that particular Singapore posture: interested, restrained, not wanting to be in the way.
I did not approach. I had no business there. From where I stood I could see wet pavement, a cluster of uniformed figures, and the kind of stillness that means work is being done that strangers should not watch. I looked at my shoes. I looked at the oranges. I looked away.
On the bus later — the long one down to Bukit Panjang — I searched for news and found fragments. Enough to know something serious had occurred. Not enough to feel I had witnessed it. I had witnessed the periphery: lights, rain drying on my sleeve, the way a city holds its breath for a minute and then releases it back into traffic.
I am not a reporter. I do not have a theory. I have a memory of choosing not to step closer, and of walking the last stretch home along the park connector with the book under my arm and the oranges smelling too sweet.
The kitchen window was open when I arrived. Rain had started again. I wrote this the next morning because the image of those lights would not leave the edge of my vision, and putting words on a page is the only habit I trust to move something from the front of my mind to the back.
Segar felt unchanged when I crossed the usual junction — the same provision shop light, the same LRT hum overhead, the same auntie walking her dog at the hour she always walks her dog. I wondered if anyone on my side of the island had heard the sirens the way I had, or if distance makes events smaller faster here than we admit.
I peeled one of the bruised oranges over the sink. The book sat on the table where I drop everything: keys, receipts, the rubber bands from vegetable stalls. I read two pages and realised I had retained nothing. My attention kept sliding back to the crossing, the blue light on wet tar, the decision not to step closer. It was not heroism. It was boundaries — the sense that some scenes are not for passing strangers.
In the days after, I took my usual walks along the park connector and noticed how quickly routine reasserts itself. Joggers, cyclists, a child learning to ride without training wheels while a parent jogged backwards, calling instructions. Bukit Panjang is good at continuing. That is a kindness and also a kind of forgetting, and I am not sure which I needed more that week.
I publish this note without commentary because commentary would pretend I understand more than I do. Wesley, from a flat with a kitchen window and a habit of walking while the road is still wet — that is the full authority I bring. The rest is weather, distance, and the memory of lights I did not chase.
