The pedestrian light changes for nobody in particular.
I stand at the crossing near Aljunied most evenings after work, sometimes twice if the first crossing was rushed. The button is scuffed white plastic, the housing cracked in a corner where someone leaned too hard. When the green man appears he walks with the same calm whether I am alone or in a crowd of twelve.
That December evening traffic was heavy in both directions — cars, a bus breathing at the kerb, two motorcycles threading the gap with a geometry I do not envy. I waited even though others stepped early. Not virtue. Habit formed after years of watching near-misses become stories told at coffee shops with too much drama and too few details.
While waiting I noticed the island in the middle of the road: a metre of concrete with a metal pole and a sticker for a service I will never call. Someone had left a leaf there, brown and complete, as if the island were a shelf. The city deposits small still lifes everywhere if you look without trying to photograph them.
When the light changed I walked with the group, which is its own tiny sociology — fast walkers ahead, phone-checkers behind, someone holding a child's hand at the exact tension where safety meets trust. We dispersed on the other side without acknowledgement, the way people do after shared temporary alignment.
I typed this note two days later because the first draft on my phone was only "green man calm / leaf on island / bus breath." Expansion is not always embellishment. Sometimes it is retrieval — bringing back the temperature, the smell of exhaust mixed with rain on hot asphalt, the scarf I did not need but wore anyway.
Crossings are underrated as places to think. You are forced to pause. The pause has a countdown. The countdown removes infinity from waiting.
I still cross here most evenings. The button is still scuffed. The green man still walks with the same calm. I am still writing one line about it when something worth keeping appears.
Rain started on the walk from the crossing to my block — the kind that is not heavy enough for an umbrella but sufficient to make collars darker. I thought about how crossings measure impatience in whole seconds. Whole seconds are long when you are tired. Whole seconds are brief when you are waiting for someone.
Aljunied at dusk smells like exhaust and soup overlapping. That overlap is Singapore in a sentence I am allowed to write because I live inside it, not because I am reviewing it for visitors.
The green man blinked. We crossed. The island in the middle of the road held the leaf still, untouched by shoes. Small permanence in a place built for waiting.
At my block I wiped rain from my sleeves and checked the mail — flyers only, always flyers. The crossing note joined the others on the table beside the radio, waiting its turn to be typed. The leaf stayed on the island for someone else to notice tomorrow morning perhaps still.