I set out at seven because the park connector near Kallang Bahru is widest then—before cyclists in earnest, before the joggers with meetings to make. The canal lay flat, a mirror with patience. Clouds that looked rumpled overhead copied themselves perfectly below, and for a moment I could not tell which side I was supposed to trust. I stood on the railing side and breathed the damp green smell that rises when night releases the grass.
A heron I have seen before—one missing a tail feather—stood mid-stream on a concrete sill. It did not move when a runner passed. I admired that concentration. My own mind had been skittering since waking, jumping between errands and half-formed paragraphs. The bird offered a counter-lesson: stay until the fish decides.
The path curved where the housing blocks stepped back to make room for trees planted years ago and still not fully grown. Someone had chalked a child's hopscotch grid on the pavement, smudged by dew. I stepped around it carefully, though no one was watching. Small respects matter on public ground. A maintenance worker nodded from a bench where he ate nasi lemak from foil, clocking me as local rather than tourist with a glance I could not decode but accepted.
At the bridge near Lavender, the water darkened under shadow, the mirror broken by ripples from a delivery boat I had not heard approach. The reflection fractured into shards that reassembled slowly once the wake passed. I thought about drafts that look ruined until you walk away and return—how disturbance is sometimes part of the composition rather than damage.
I sat on the third bench after the bridge, the one with a view of both the canal and a row of drying laundry on a high floor. A sentence I had been holding for days finally settled: not clever, just accurate, about the way evening light would later bronze the railing bolts. I wrote it in pencil because ink feels too permanent at seven in the morning.
On the walk back, bus numbers flickered on the LED screen at the stop without any bus attached yet. The city preparing language before vehicles. I reached home with damp shoes and a pocket notebook heavier by one line. The canal mirror would change by noon—oil slick, breeze, rain if the forecast kept its promise—but the seven o'clock version belonged to me now, stored where I store most things worth keeping: not on a shelf, but in the margin of a page that already had other plans.
I reheated leftover tea and read the line again. It still did not explain the heron or the hopscotch grid, which was fine. Explanation is not always the job. Sometimes the job is to mark where the water was flat enough to show you your own face without asking you to interpret it. Geylang Bahru traffic resumed its ordinary volume. I closed the notebook and let the morning proceed.
By afternoon the canal had lost its mirror entirely—breeze and boat wake saw to that. I did not mind. The seven o'clock version was the one worth keeping on the page.
