After ten o'clock my flat changes character. The corridor outside goes quiet. The lift makes its last few journeys for the night. I move from the kitchen to the desk by the window — the same desk, the same angle, the same three lines I allow myself before I close the notebook.
Line one: something seen. Line two: something heard. Line three: something I do not yet understand. Tonight: seen — the neighbour's cat crossing the carpark stripe; heard — a distant motorcycle fading toward Havelock; not understood — why satisfaction arrives more reliably in three sentences than in three pages.
This ritual began without intention during a month when sleep was scarce. I thought constraining the page would constrain the mind. It did not fix sleep. It did fix the habit of hoarding observations until they rotted into guilt. Now the lines are a valve. Open, release, close.
The window frames a slice of Chin Swee Road — not the whole slope, just enough to remind me where I am. Laundry on pole seven flaps once and stills. A light in Blk 55 toggles off. The city performs its small closures. I add nothing melodramatic to the notebook. Melodrama is for days when the lines refuse to come.
When the third line is written, I cap the pen. The ritual ends. I brush my teeth. I sleep better on nights when the ritual is kept than on nights when I bargain with myself for a fourth line. Discipline disguised as poetry — or the other way around. The window does not care. It keeps its square of darkness until morning.