Pasir Ris
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Pasir Ris
In a remote corner of Singapore, there is a place called Pasir Ris. It is so called for the sand and the beach found in that area, where the original village was named after. I remember the pretty beach, although I don't exactly remember why I was there in the first place. I remember a blurry train ride to the world's end, a blurry bus ride to the middle of nowhere, and then the sound of the waves kissing the shores like a lover. It was myself and a few friends, whose faces now remain equally blurry and unclear now. That is how long I haven't been to that place, despite it being my favorite beach in Singapore. There aren't a lot to choose from really, just your usual East Coast Park which is usually polluted by families and children, and then Changi Beach with a bunch of homosexuals. There aren't a lot of beaches in Singapore to boast about, unless you want to count Siloso and Padawan into the equation. Though, strictly speaking, they are just piles of sand dumped there by giant trucks over the years. Artificial beaches do not count, thank you very much. Pasir Ris beach still remains my favorite beach in this small tropical island, really because of how isolated it is from the rest of the country, much like Pasir Ris itself.
I traveled all the way down to Pasir Ris by bus this Saturday, and some may think that I must have been out of my mind. It isn't actually the kind of place you'd want to go to, if not for some special purposes at hand. To visit the relatives, to visit a friend, to go to the beach, to make out at the beach, or perhaps you were aiming for the airport when you winded up there. Oh yes, that is not to mention those dreadful days in the army when I frequented that part of the island often, a part of my life which I'd gladly leave behind in the waves for good to take away when the tide falls. I remember standing there in the darkness and in my uniform at the bus interchange, just waiting for the bus to take us away to the island offshore. It was a weekly routine, we did that every Sunday at seven in the evening. A bunch of us would line up in lead rows and then pack ourselves into buses and be shipped off to an island we'd like to run away from. Other than the beach, I have little love for that place at all. That place meant torture, dread, and an overall sense of death for some reason. I never liked that place, to be honest, until last Saturday.
Pasir Ris is a curious place, because you'd not expect a lot of people to want to stay so far away from the city. I mean, this is Singapore we are talking about, and you thought that every one prefers that violent jolt of the city to the serenity of the suburbs. The last time I took 53 that far was, well, almost two years ago I suppose, and the sceneries were hidden behind a thick veil of darkness. I was there in the evening, and everything beyond the edge of the road on the expressway was practically pitch black. Traveling down TPE, strangely, gave me a sense of me traveling to another country altogether. Buildings gave way to forests, forests gave way to fields, and then there was nothing for a few miles before we turned off the expressway and into alien territory. I am not familiar with this neighborhood, and the rows and rows of buildings looked somewhat science fiction to me. The people here looked different, they acted different, and even their buildings looked somewhat different. It may merely be some trickery of the mind, but I was certain that I was not being paranoid whatsoever. OK, maybe I was, because I was distracted by the possibility of getting lost, and the ride was taking forever.
This is pretty much what I saw in Pasir Ris. You get HDB, HDB, HDB, HDB, a random school no one has ever heard before, HDB, HDB, HDB. Further down the road, you probably get a mall, and then further on from there you get HDB, HDB, and then even more HDB. Once in a while you get a park of sorts, but then it is so small you could have mistook it for a grass patch. Then the small patch of grass gets sandwiched between even more HDBs, and most of them are in strange colors as well. There was a block that I was at, painted in pink like some horrendous clinical medicine. Funny thing was how the residences actually voted on that dreadful color, which got me thinking about the possibility of the people in Pasir Ris actually being completely detached from the rest of the country, even in terms of their choice of color. I mean, the building just looked like a giant capsule or something, or maybe it was painted with leftover cough syrups. It was horrible to say the least, but it's not like the people there cared too much about it. They went about their daily lives as usual, pushing baby trams around and carrying their plastic bags. Normal.
I wonder what the people in Pasir Ris do for leisure, since everywhere is too far away. They have a couple of schools, a couple of parks, and I don't consider Whitesands a shopping mall at all. I have been there before, and the only reason why I liked that place was for the hot muffins that Coffee Bean made at that time. Then Coffee Bean disappeared, which is as good as shooting blanks on a rifle for me. Whitesands shopping mall is no more than a giant concrete building with a bit of steel here and there, nothing more. Anyway, people don't seem to mind the apparent boredom of the place though, choosing instead to dwell in the serenity of the neighborhood. It is a pretty awesome neighborhood if you are the type to go for peace and silence over anything else. Other than the occasional jogs in the park, the bicycles, the subpar malls, I am not sure what in the world they do in the neighborhood. I'd probably like a retreat in Pasir Ris though, but definitely not stay there for long periods of time. Even if a car is present, the idea of driving all the way over there can be pretty, well, let's just say it's not something I'd like to do on a daily basis.
With that said, however, some would wonder what in the world I was doing in Pasir Ris. Well, I didn't have much of a choice since 53 went that way. Besides, my destination was really the airport and not Pasir Ris itself. You see, Singapore seems to be so proud of its spanking new terminal three, and there is a certain somebody who has an infinite amount of fascination in regards to the airport. It's strange, and I suppose it is a Singaporean thing, to visit the airport for meals. I mean, you won't find people hanging out at the airport for the sake of hanging out, but that's what Singaporeans do. They go to the airport for lunches and dinners, which may seem odd at first until you visit the place yourself. It really is quite a beautiful terminal to say the least, and the word "enormous" comes to mind easily. It was Saturday, and yet there weren't a lot of people in the airport at all. Just hints of people here and there, minding their own businesses. That place wasn't an airport, but it was a mall that just so happened to have planes landing every once in a while. Seriously, you'd think that two terminals would be enough. Apparently, they one-upped themselves this time around.
It's strange, with her, to be able to just prance through through the airport and still make time fly. Just pick anywhere, and we are probably going to have a good time anyway. It's probably a secret ability of ours, but I suppose that is what you get with people that, well, get you. Anyway, somewhere as mundane as the airport suddenly turned into our playground. Anywhere was possible, just the side of the corridor or in the corner of a restaurant, getting high on ice water. It was possible, because we connected on a level that only creeps and social outcasts could. Though, I always think that we are really the normal ones, and everybody else are just weird and abnormal. Anyway, taking the sky train used to be a lot more fun than it is now, though. Well, everything was fun when I was half as tall as I am right now, and the train did feel a whole lot faster with that high pitched sound when it speeds up. Now, you hardly get a ride anyway, and you don't get seats either - the monstrosity!
So we bought a couple of snacks from the restaurant downstairs, a few croissants and eclairs, and we headed down to her neighborhood to hang out. That was when I noticed how quiet it was in the neighborhood, so quiet that I could have heard a pin drop. Maybe it was because it was getting late, and the students weren't in school on a weekend. It was deathly quiet even in the playground underneath a HDB block, and I could hear cats mating in the distant stairwell somewhere. Children waved their sparklers around like little fairies on a metal leash, and they threw them up into the trees like how I like to do it. We hung out on the platform underneath a shelter in the playground, and a game of hopscotch brought back tons of memories, along with the standing broad jump which I haven't done in a long time. So yes, even playgrounds work perfectly for the both of us, as she laid upon my stomach as we watched the reflection of the moonlight on the roof of the school hall. The children left and the people trickled pass the playground, and it was about time for the both of us to head on home.
Pasir Ris, what a strange place indeed. It began with a pleasant surprise when I found the beach, then a deeply rooted hate for the bus interchange. Now, it just seems to be back to where I started, a place with a lot of pleasant surprises. From the gentle warmth of body heat to the smell of hair, then the pressure of bodies pressed together, and then the silences in between words that felt like eternity - in a good way. And then the bus took me back to the expressway, then through the winding streets and back to a place that, well, I grew all too familiar a year ago. The window in the living room was opened so slightly, and the lights in the bedroom were turned on. I could tell from where I was, because I only really had to look up from the window of the bus that stops in front of the block. I pictured you, your shadow, at the window like that other time when I stayed underneath your block for an hour or two for no reasons at all. Suddenly, that's how it happened, I realized - I really don't need you any longer. Sure, the word "girlfriend" slipped my tongue a couple of times, and I have no excuses for that. Still, as the bus pulled away from your stop, I knew, I just knew. I don't need you anymore.
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on Sunday, September 14, 2008 at 4:31 PM.
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