Sunday mornings I walk the fence line — chain link on one side, grass on the other, flats visible ahead and the sea wall audible before you see it. I start at the same post where the paint marks a repair patch. I end where the fence turns toward the carpark. Forty minutes if I do not stop. An hour if I do.
This is not exercise in the fitness sense. I do not count steps on an app. I count posts — every fourth one gets a touch of my palm, a habit from childhood walks with my father along a different fence near Changi. He called them boundary markers. I call them proof that I showed up again.
The field side changes slowly. After rain, puddles mirror sky in rectangles. Dry weeks, the grass yellows evenly. Once a kite caught in the wire fluttered for days until the wind tore it free. I noted the colour — red against grey mesh — and thought about how things travel farther than the people who release them.
The fence line separates public from permitted, open from managed. I stay on the path because rules are part of the ritual. Obedience can be a form of respect when the land behind the wire is resting. On Sundays the field is mostly empty except for distant joggers and the occasional dog on a long lead.
When I reach the bend, the sea wall comes into view. Sound arrives first — low wash, sometimes voices from the beach further on. I stop here every time, not because I am tired, but because the perimeter completes itself in this sight line: fence, field, wall, water. Pasir Ris as a thin strip makes sense here.
I walk back along the same side. The same posts. The same repair patch at the start. People who see me weekly nod once. We do not need names. We share a route and a hour that belongs to neither of our work weeks.
By the time I reach home, my shoes carry dust and a little dew. The rest of Sunday unfolds — laundry, calls, food. But the fence line walk has already happened. It is the part of the week I trust most. Not because it changes anything. Because it marks the edge I live beside and says, plainly, that I noticed it again.
