Kopi after the Ang Mo Kio market run
The wet market opens before the sun finds the HDB blocks. Plastic bags rustle like dry leaves; aunties compare prices without raising their voices; the fish stall sprays ice chips that catch the fluorescent light.
I buy kopi beans the way my mother taught me — not as tradition, but as a small contract with the week. The uncle remembers without asking. That continuity matters more than any headline.
Around me, uncles queue for chye sim, students half-asleep over phones, a cleaner sweeping the same square metre twice because the first pass was thinking, not working.
I carry the bag home folded twice, the way market bags are meant to be folded. The corridor smells of someone's lunch already cooking. The lift arrives on the wrong side, as lifts do.
At the kitchen table I pour the first cup and leave the notebook open. The market run is not an event. It is a spine for the day.
If you have a stall you visit every week, you already understand this note. If you do not, try one morning without headphones. The sound is half the errand.
The market uncle’s stall opens before the sun clears the block — I arrive when the plastic sheets are still half-drawn.
Chye sim prices shift by fifty cents without announcement; aunties treat that as conversation, not scandal.
I carry oranges home in the same bag as kopi beans because smells mingle pleasantly on the walk back.