The Candle on the Forty-Second Floor
We couldn’t fly home for our anniversary, so we booked a room twenty minutes from our flat. It took one night to understand what we were really celebrating.
The candle wouldn’t stay lit.
The air-conditioning kept bending the flame sideways, and we had to cup our hands around it like people sheltering a match in the wind. It was a single thin candle, pink and white, pushed into a slice of pandan chiffon we’d carried up from a bakery near our block. The paper box had gone soft from the heat on the walk to the taxi. The cake had leaned to one side.
Behind it, the window took up the whole wall.
Forty-two floors down, the city was going on without us. Cars moving in slow red lines. The bay was dark and still. Out past it, the ships at anchor sat in the strait with their lights on, dozens of them, like a second city floating on the water.
We blew out the candle together. It went out on its own a second before we reached it.
We laughed. Then neither of us said anything for a while.
We had come all this way, twenty minutes by taxi, to feel like we were somewhere else. Instead, for the first time, we felt like we were here.
The Trip We Didn’t Take
It was supposed to be a flight.
Our anniversary had always meant going somewhere. A long weekend, a new city, a small hotel with a bad lamp and a good breakfast. That was how we marked another year.
But that year the leave days were gone, spent on a trip home for a family matter that couldn’t wait. The flights had gone up. The weekend was short. And the idea of a seven-hour journey to celebrate one quiet night felt more tiring than romantic.
We mentioned it at lunch, half-complaining, to a local colleague.
She didn’t understand the problem.
Just staycation lah, she said, stirring her laksa. Everybody does.
We thought she was joking. Who books a hotel in the city they already live in?
But she wasn’t joking. She told us about her parents’ fortieth anniversary at a hotel by the river, her nephew’s birthday by a pool on Sentosa, the night she and her friends rented a suite after the last exam of university and didn’t sleep at all. She spoke about it the way you’d mention a family recipe. Something ordinary and well loved. Something you did because that was how things were marked here.
On a small island, she said, you don’t always go far. You go somewhere else close by.
The Lobby That Felt Like Arriving
We packed one small bag. It felt silly.
A change of clothes, a swimsuit, two toothbrushes. The taxi took us past our usual bus stop and the coffee shop where we bought our kopi every morning, then onto the expressway, then into the tall glass center of the city we crossed every weekday for work.
The lobby was cold and smelled of lemongrass. Someone handed us small glasses of chilled juice. The woman at the front desk had noticed the note in our booking. She wished us happy anniversary before we’d said a word, then slid the key cards across with a smile.
We had walked past this building a hundred times. We had never once looked up.
Standing in that lobby with our little bag, we felt like travelers. Our bodies didn’t know the difference. The marble floor, the soft music, the stranger welcoming us. It all said you have arrived.
It turns out you don’t need distance to feel like a guest. You only need a door you’ve never opened.
The Pool at Dusk
We went down to the pool as the light turned gold.
We had expected couples, quiet and polished. Instead it was full of families.
A grandmother floated in the shallow end on a pink inflatable ring, her sunhat still on, perfectly content. Three cousins were taking turns cannonballing while an uncle pretended to referee. In a cabana at the far end, someone had strung up a foil banner that said HAPPY 7TH BIRTHDAY, and a little boy in goggles was ignoring his own party to chase a ball along the edge.
A father sat with his feet in the water, a can of Tiger beer beside him. He wasn’t on his phone. He was just watching his children.
We understood then what our colleague had meant.
This wasn’t escape for them. It was gathering. The flat at home was too small for everyone. The weekend was too short for a trip. So they took a few rooms in a hotel across town, three generations under one roof for a night, and called it a holiday.
We slid into the water and swam to the edge of the pool. The skyline went pink, then violet, then lit up floor by floor.
Somewhere behind us, the family began singing happy birthday in two languages, out of time, loud and happy.
For a moment, this felt like where the city lets go, with nobody needing to be anywhere but here.
Dinner, Downstairs and Down the Road
We had booked a table at the hotel restaurant. We cancelled it an hour before.
We weren’t sure why. It just didn’t feel like us.
Instead we walked out into the warm night, past the office towers going dark, toward the old Victorian hawker centre at the edge of the financial district. By then the road beside it had closed to traffic. The satay stalls had set up their grills in a long smoky row, and plastic tables filled the street.
Get Expat life SG’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
We ordered thirty sticks, chicken and mutton, too many for two people. They came on a metal tray with cucumber, raw onion, cubes of rice cake, and a small bowl of peanut sauce with a skin already forming on top. The smoke got into our hair and our clothes.
Office workers still in their lanyards sat at the next table. A tourist family was working out the menu with an uncle who had clearly done this ten thousand times. Our shirts stuck to our backs.
We ate with our fingers. It was the best thing we’d tasted in weeks.
Later, back in the cold, quiet room, we ordered one more thing from room service. A bowl of wonton noodles, at midnight, because we could. It arrived under a silver dome on a white cloth, the broth clear, the noodles springy, a few stalks of green vegetables arranged with great care.
It was good. It was not the hawker centre.
We ate it anyway, cross-legged on a bed too big for us, the city glowing outside.
Some celebrations happen at the table you booked. The real ones happen at the one you found.
The Call Across the Water
Around eleven, we called home.
It was afternoon there. Our parents’ faces filled the phone screen, too close, then too far, then tilted sideways as someone figured out how to hold it. Behind them was the kitchen we knew. The same calendar on the wall. The same clock that always ran four minutes fast.
They wanted to see the view. We turned the phone toward the window.
So high, our mother said. Is that the sea?
We said yes. We told them about the ships, the satay, the grandmother on the pink float. They nodded along and asked if we were eating enough.
After we hung up, the room felt very quiet.
This is the thing about celebrating far from home. The happiness is real, but it has a hollow at its center, a place where the people who would have been there are missing. You learn to celebrate around it. You learn to carry it gently, the way you carried the cake box in the heat.
We sat by the window a long time after that. We didn’t talk much.
We didn’t need to.
Kaya Toast Among the Croissants
Breakfast was a buffet the size of a small market.
Stations everywhere. A man making omelettes to order. A wall of pastries. Smoked salmon, cheeses, fruit cut into perfect cubes. We filled our plates the way you do on holiday, with more than anyone could eat.
But tucked between the croissants and the waffle iron, there was a small corner that stopped us.
Kaya toast, thin and crisp, with cold slabs of butter pressed inside. Soft-boiled eggs in a little bowl, ready for a dash of dark soy and white pepper. A pot of kopi, thick and sweet. An auntie in a hotel uniform tended it all, her movements quick and practiced, as if she’d been making this breakfast her whole life before anyone put it under a chandelier.
We skipped the waffles. We sat with our toast and our runny eggs and our too-sweet coffee, and it tasted exactly like the coffee shop under our block.
It tasted, in other words, like home. Not the old home. The new one.
We had checked into a hotel to get away from our ordinary life. Breakfast handed it right back to us, on a small plate, with butter.
The Short Ride Back
Checkout was at noon. We stretched it to the last minute.
The taxi home took nineteen minutes. Same expressway. Same towers. Same exit near our block, same bus stop, same coffee shop with the same uncle pouring kopi from a long-spouted pot.
Nothing had changed. And yet the city looked different through the window.
We had seen it from forty-two floors up. We had watched its ships at night and its families at play. We had eaten in its smoke and its silver domes. For one night, we had lived in it as visitors, and that small distance had let us see it whole.
When we opened the door to our flat, it smelled faintly of the morning we’d left it. Detergent, old coffee, the frangipani from the corridor drifting in.
We put down our little bag. We were home.
What We Carry Now
We’ve done it again since. A birthday by the river. A quiet weekend on Sentosa when the year had been too much. A night in an old shophouse hotel in Chinatown, where the floorboards creaked and the incense from the temple down the street drifted through the shutters at dawn.
Each time, we bring a slice of cake from the bakery near our block. Each time, the box goes soft in the heat.
We don’t know how many more anniversaries we’ll mark on this island. Postings end. Leases lapse. One day we’ll celebrate somewhere else, and this city will become a place we used to know.
But we’ve stopped waiting for home to be somewhere far away before we let ourselves celebrate.
Home, it turns out, can be a hotel room twenty minutes from your front door. A tray of satay on a closed-off street. A grandmother floating in a pool. A pot of kopi in a corner of a buffet.
And a single pink candle on a windowsill, flickering in the cold air, going out before we’re ready.
It doesn’t matter.
We make the wish anyway.
