Every Tuesday I leave the flat before the corridor fully wakes and take the bus to the nature park entrance I know by the colour of its signboard. The path splits early — left toward the quarry view, right toward the steps I count. I always turn right. Fourteen granite steps, each one warm or cool depending on shade, each one counted under my breath the way you count tiles when you cannot sleep.
Weekday mornings belong to joggers and one uncle who stretches against the railing without ever looking embarrassed. I walk slower than all of them. That is intentional. The steps are not exercise for me. They are a reset — a vertical line in a week that otherwise runs horizontally between clinic forms and grocery aisles.
Step one is always mossy on the left edge. Step seven creaks faintly when the park is dry. Step fourteen opens onto a flat stretch where the trees thin and you can hear traffic again, disappointing and reassuring in equal measure. I know these details the way you know a kitchen — not because they matter to anyone else, but because repetition makes a map inside your body.
On the flat stretch I stop for water and check the time without really needing to. The tally is complete. Fourteen up, fourteen down if I take the same route back, which I usually do. The number does not change. My breathing does — slower at the top, slower still when I descend with knees slightly soft, the way the physiotherapist at work once demonstrated and I never forgot.
Once a macaque sat on step nine and refused to move until a jogger clapped twice. I waited. The count paused at eight. The monkey left. I resumed at nine. The week had a gap in it I still remember — a step skipped not by choice but by negotiation.
People ask why the same park, the same steps, the same Tuesday. I do not have a poetic answer. Bukit Batok Nature Park is close enough to reach without planning and large enough to feel briefly elsewhere. The granite does not care about my admin spreadsheets. The count clears them anyway.
By the time I reach the bus stop for home, the steps live in my legs more than my head. I will return next Tuesday. The moss will still favour the left edge of step one. The uncle will still stretch. Fourteen steps — no more, no less — and the week sorted into something I can carry back to the corridor and the kettle and the small lists waiting on the kitchen counter.
