Canal Water, Tuesday

Tuesday was clear after three days of rain, and the canal path behind my block looked washed clean in a way that only lasts until the next downpour. I walked it in the hour between lunch and my afternoon call, which I had already decided to take from my phone while pacing because sitting through another video meeting would make my shoulders lock. The park connector was mostly empty — a jogger with earbuds, an auntie power-walking with arms that swung like metronomes, a boy on a scooter who stopped every twenty metres to poke at something in the drain.

The water in the canal was higher than usual, brown at the edges and clearer in the middle where the current pulled. Leaves floated in slow clusters. A plastic bottle caught on a root and spun until the flow freed it. I have walked this path hundreds of times — it connects Simei to the next estate and saves ten minutes compared to the pavement along the main road — but after rain the path feels different, the way a familiar room feels different when the windows are open.

I stopped at the bench near the bend where the railing is rusted and the view opens toward the expressway. From there you can see the tops of lorries and, on a clear day, a slice of sea if you stand on your toes, which I did not bother doing because the point was not the view. The point was to move my legs and let my head go quiet. Work had been a tangle of emails since eight. The canal did not care about my inbox.

I heard birds — mynahs, I think, though I am bad at names — and the distant hum of traffic that never fully leaves Singapore even when you are beside water. Someone had left a footprint in the mud where the path narrowed. A maintenance worker in an orange vest checked the drain cover and nodded at me without stopping. The sun was warm on my neck. I had not put on sunscreen because the forecast said twenty-eight degrees and cloudy, and the forecast was half wrong again.

I walked to the end of the connector and turned back, timing myself without a watch — roughly twelve minutes each way, which I know from repetition. On the return leg I passed the same jogger going the opposite direction. We did not acknowledge each other. That is fine. Not every walk needs company. I thought about what I would write in my notebook later and decided I would write about the water level and the boy's scooter and nothing else, because adding meaning where there is none is a habit I am trying to break.

When I reached home, my shoes were dusty at the toes and my call had moved by fifteen minutes, which gave me time to make tea and sit by the window overlooking the canal from the upper floor instead of beside it. Same water, different angle. I opened my ledger and wrote: "Canal water, Tuesday. Higher. Brown edges. Walked alone." Then I added one more line: "The boy on the scooter found a frog. Put it back." That was the whole entry. It was enough.

Evening came the way evenings come in Simei — gradually, then all at once when the streetlights click on. I did not walk the canal again. Once a day is my limit for the same path unless something changes. Nothing changed. The water would recede. The path would dry. I would walk it again next week, probably on another Tuesday, because Tuesdays are when work leaves a gap and my legs know what to do with gaps.