The upper deck is where the city becomes a sequence of frames.
I take the long bus along Paya Lebar Road when the MRT feels too direct, which is a ridiculous reason and also a sufficient one. From the front seat upstairs you see rooftops in layers — water tanks, laundry poles, antennae pointing at nothing in particular. The glass is never clean enough for photography and always clean enough for thinking.
That Sunday the sky held a colour I do not have a name for: not quite pink, not quite grey, the colour of a day deciding whether to rain. The bus stopped often. Each stop brought a small choreography of boarding and leaving. An auntie with a wheeled market bag took the seat diagonal to mine and immediately fell asleep, her head trusting the window in a way I cannot manage.
I wrote on my phone because paper slides on a moving lap. Two sentences about the auntie's bag — floral nylon, one zipper repaired with twine. One sentence about a billboard for something I forgot the moment we passed it. The bus is honest about what matters: whatever is beside you and whatever is about to leave the frame.
Near Eunos the road widens and the view opens to a strip of trees that someone maintains against odds. I watch them the way other people watch sports — for variation, for surprise, for proof that something grows without permission. Then the corridor tightens again and the shops return with their identical heights and different facades.
Lower deck passengers talk louder. Up here it is mostly silence and engine vibration translated through the spine. I think that is why people choose this seat: not for the view alone but for the way noise thins out. You still belong to the route, but you are slightly removed from its social weather.
When I alight at my stop I always look back once at the upper deck windows, lit from inside like a row of small aquariums. Someone else will take my seat for the next leg. The city continues its loop.
This note stayed short on the bus and grew only when I typed it at the table. Some pieces know their length before you do.
The auntie woke at her stop without drama, adjusted her bag, and stepped down into a crowd that absorbed her immediately. I watched the floral nylon disappear and felt the small loneliness of upper-deck witnessing — you see people completely and then they are gone, like frames cut from a reel.
Paya Lebar Road at that hour is a lesson in repetition. Same shops, same billboards, same tree maintenance fighting the same exhaust. The bus makes repetition visible because the window frames it. Walking hides the pattern. Riding reveals it.
I transferred once and lost the seat — punishment for hesitating at a stop where the queue looked longer than it was. The second bus smelled different, more cleaning fluid, less rain. Notes survive transfers if you hold the first sentence tightly enough.
A teenager played a game without sound, thumbs fast, face lit. The upper deck held many private rooms like that, each window a different interior.