MSCP Nocturne

I have learned the colour of my lot— red, the shade of a thing that has been assigned, that does not need to explain itself anymore.

The uncle passes at ten, at twelve, at two, hands behind his back, going nowhere with more conviction than I have managed in months. I do not know if I envy him. I know his shoes. I know the small scuff on his left heel that tells me he lists, slightly, toward something he has not named.

Outside, the OBU beeps— not mine. Never mine now. The Nissan from lot 47 goes out every morning into the full suffering of it: the gantry, the sun flat on the bonnet like a hand pressing down, the jams at Boon Lay, the long way home. It comes back smelling of somewhere. I have forgotten what somewhere smells like.

I was made for the expressway. My range, my torque, my silent green promise— all of it pointed, like a sentence, toward departure.

But he comes at noon, opens the door, and the heat falls off him like a coat he is finally allowed to remove. He reclines the seat. He sleeps.

And I run the air-conditioning. I run it the way you do a thing that has become, quietly, your only purpose— without resentment, without ceremony, the way the void deck holds whoever needs it, not asking where they came from, not asking where they mean to go.

I used to think I understood this country from the roads. The flyovers, the grey geometry of the PIE at dawn. But maybe you only understand it from the inside of a parked car—

the way a man will give up almost anything, the journey, the elsewhere, the open road,