I have a bad habit of looking down when I walk. Not down as in I’m constantly staring at my feet, though perhaps that’s only because ticks like these have ameliorated with age and with the incessant reprimands of my childhood ballet instructor, but down as in downcast. Lids lowered, eye lashes like ink awning pulled out over under eyes, gaze sweeping the street. It’s annoying, because only when you look down do you notice all the trash at your feet. The twisted beer cans cluttered in street corners, the litter peppering across pavement, the rotting leaves peeking out from between rusted iron grating.

Look too long at it, and my thoughts curdle. Don’t look and — I look down as I pass the opening of an alleyway, my gaze snagging on cigarette butts and someone’s leftovers — I’m sorry, I have to look. I can’t help but look. Out of sight does not mean out of mind. I can’t see it, but it exists. So I have to see it, to prove to myself that I am not wrong in believing it is there. If I search for it, I know I can always find it. Those rough edges, the grit, the grime, the human waste of the city, regardless of which city I am in. It is an itch I have to scratch.

I walk along the sidewalk, against the current of tires crunching over gravel roads and the meandering clusters of uniformed school children. People who don’t look down. Brown puddles of rain gather at the edge of the curb, from when a thunderstorm had just pelted through. I look down to avoid them, walk fast to buy take-out for dinner. Tropical weather, I guess. If God had the temper of a tropical thunderstorm, we’d all be extinct by now.

I weave past a construction site, its outsides tented with metal scaffolding and shielded in blue tarp. Right beside it is a restaurant — no, a food stand. It’s spacious, it has its own seating of plastic chairs and rickety metal tables set up on the sidewalk, its open kitchen faces the street, but the word “restaurant” somehow connotes some degree of comfort, luxury. A higher price point. Definitely not the word to describe Lam’s Abalone Soup. I push my headphones off of one ear and step up to the counter. One salted yolk fish skin and one chili wontons, I say in Chinese, I brought my own containers. They charge for take-out boxes in Singapore. What? The cashier squints at me, as if that would help him hear me better. I repeat myself through the muffling material of my face mask. He nods, yells a few words into the kitchen at the back. 10 SG, he mutters. I hand him the bill, dig through my backpack, hand him my plastic container too, now washed clean after having carried take-out from another stall. I can’t remember which.

I push my headphones back into place, leave Lam’s with two stacked containers swinging from a bag in my right hand, and weave through an older neighborhood on my way back. Here too, I look down between steps. But not too much. No need to obsess over something I can’t change. I walk out of a short tunnel, hold back a smile when a man biking past me tries to grab a pigeon out of the air. The bird is audaciously daring, its wingtip nearly flicks his cheek.

It’s a red light, so I stop at the underpass and look down, to my right, a little ways off the sidewalk towards a spot of pebbled earth. I’ve been looking at it for the past week now. Every time I pass here, I can’t help but look. It’s a dead pigeon. It’s rotting. Its feathers ruffle in the air as cars rush by. I can’t see past its one tattered wing, but I can imagine. Some things are better left unseen.

A middle aged man stops at the red light too. Sees me looking down, and notices the dead bird. Looks at me looking at it. Looks away. The light turns green and he leaves. I cross the street too, a few steps behind him. I think of a dead squirrel I saw on campus once, its body framed by a pile of brown leaves and shriveled dry in late November. 

I wonder if my chili wontons will taste good tonight.