EW21/CC22

Disclaimer: please read this series of posts starting from EW29, then backwards.

Change at this station for the Circle Line...

I won't be able to complete my sentence because you'd immediately clamp a hand over my mouth. You've heard the announcement so many times on your own, you didn't need me to echo and intensify it.

You got so annoyed by it that you always pretended to slit my throat, my biggest psychological weakness. But it didn't stop me from anticipating that familiar ring, that familiar voice with the pauses and tone that I have memorised.

In anticipation for the Thomson Line, I wondered what the interchange announcements would be like. I repeated Change at this station for the Thomson Line, in many different tones, asking what you thought the finalised one would be. Your response was simple: who cares?

But I did. And deep inside, I didn't care that you didn't. You could clamp a hand over me all you wanted, but nothing would stop my mind from exploding at its seams. I loved to annoy you with my imitations, testing how far I could say it before you reached my mouth. Maybe it truly got on your nerves, but sometimes it just felt like a game to me.

The love for trains was not the only thing that made us different. Majority of our time passing by here, you were technically a white-collared worker. You looked so smart in your ironed shirt and gelled fringe, while I always showed up in my ripped jeans and uncombed hair.

You had nothing interesting to say most of the time, so you resorted to listening to me go on about the books I was reading. Your hands would be on my waist and mine around your neck; a very neat man with this unkempt girl. Sometimes you let me go suddenly, when you realised one of your colleagues was on the same train. Always somehow ashamed of me.

All my love for the things you didn't care about, from the stories I read to the announcements I mimicked. You were love drunk most of the year, fixated on me no matter what I talked about. No matter how little to none interest you had.

Back in 2013, when we walked along the streets by Masjid Sultan, I saw a bus with this station's pixelated name. Buona Vista, I mimicked, and immediately declared that I could be the MRT announcer woman.

You laughed at me, and it contributed to the line being drawn between us. But once upon a time, it was these differences that made you love me more than anything. You thought it was a phase that would disappear, but turned out it was your love that did.