A Slower Mode of Time
The drone of cicada song drifts into the apartment from the wooded hillside across the road. It arrives in waves. Internal chorus and coda mingle, abruptly fade, and restart—reminding me of an internet dial-up connection from 1999. The ebb and flow of their song becomes less discernible as the morning wears on, subsumed by more powerful currents—ones I know well. Twenty floors below, fleets of buses discharge their human cargo at places of employment. My neighbour is chopping vegetables, and another is vacuuming their floor—my ceiling. I succumb to the morning’s gravitational pull and drift out of bed.
I watch people crossing the footbridge from the MTR into office towers—a blur of bodies attuned to globalised time.
My thoughts remain muddled as I wake, still buffering. I think back to when I was young, post-Mum, when my next-door neighbour, Gail, would sometimes drive me to school. I remember sitting in her old car, the upholstery carrying an aged yet intoxicating scent—leather mingled with cigarette smoke—waiting the requisite few minutes for the engine to warm, and watching Skittles—her cat—through the window, perched upon the hot water heater down the side of our house, herself observing the morning, practising her own mindfulness. I think I am trying to be that cat.
Perhaps time circles back upon itself in a loop—a repeat button of sorts. Like our earthbound flamingos, migratory creatures with nowhere to go. When I arrive home at night, the cicadas are singing once more. They have reclaimed the soundscape now that the traffic has ebbed and the last tram has returned to the Shau Kei Wan Depot. I open the sliding door. Their song drifts again into the apartment. I resist switching on the air conditioning and sit for a while beneath the ceiling fan. Their arrhythmic chorus prepares me for sleep.
Originally published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal