Twinkle Lights

Oftentimes, after my day at The Fridge, I take the longer road to the bus-stop. When I leave, the day has long been over for most, so the spine is quiet with emptiness. The traffic at the lift is minimal, so I play the lift-game. I take it to storey1 from Basement-2, then to Basement-4, then to storey-2, then to Basement-1 and finally to Storey-3. Then I walk under the covered pathway, to the road. I switch sides to walk under another long, covered sidewalk, till I reach the stop. Not my bus-stop but the reason i take the longer route. NTU's hilly garden campus has this high point. The harbor can be seen from here. The silhouettes of the ships cannot be made out because it's past twilight and the sun has set. But those twinkling lights on the ships have come up. I join the flickering dots and form ships, sail boats, ferries out of them. I can even see a gateway in the water which might open to let ships pass.

The lights twinkle as if some small-eyed chinese little girl was fluttering her false eye-lashes on the most dazzling pair of eyes. Or like a thousand christmas trees draped with twinkle lights- they havent been cut to brighten our backyards, but decorated in their place to set the horizon aglow. Like an Indian Wedding- the lights of the banquet hall visible from miles away. or the stars of the sky which have come down to make themselves seen because the bright artificial lights of Singapore do not let them show themselves.

They look like a silent promise of something humongous and brave. They are flickering in anxiety of the secrets they harbor. I choose to believe the gate i imagine is for real. What remains to be seen is to which side it opens.