By Selene Abellé for Expat Life Singapore
Living in Singapore has made me attentive to the way mornings gather before they begin. The city wakes early, but rarely all at once. It stirs in fragments: the first bus sighing at the curb, the lift doors opening onto tiled corridors, the soft roll of trolley wheels, the faint click of a gate being locked behind someone half-awake.
Here, the day does not always announce itself with light. Sometimes it arrives first as scent.
I noticed this one morning in the lift lobby of my block, before anyone had spoken.
The air was still blue with early hour. Not dark, not bright. That brief, suspended color before the sun makes decisions. I had my keys in one hand and a tote bag slipping from my shoulder. Somewhere upstairs, water ran through pipes. A child coughed once behind a closed door. The lift indicator blinked red, descending slowly: 12, 11, 10.
Beside me stood an older woman in a pale blouse, holding a takeaway cup with both hands. Steam rose through the small opening in the lid. Jasmine, warm and floral, drifted into the lobby and settled between us.
She did not look at me at first. I did not look too directly at her. We both watched the numbers change.
The steam curled and disappeared in the shared air. It touched the metal doors, the cold tile, the strap of my bag, the edge of my wrist. Outside, a mynah hopped along the railing. Somewhere below, a motorcycle started, then softened into distance. The woman shifted her weight from one slippered foot to the other. Her cup trembled slightly, not from age, I thought, but from heat.
When the lift arrived, we stepped in together.
No greeting. No weather comment. No performance of neighborliness. Just the brief choreography of two bodies making space: her moving toward the left wall, me pressing the ground-floor button, both of us reflected faintly in the brushed metal doors.
The same quiet ease exists in a wet market queue, standing shoulder to shoulder over baskets of kai-lan and fish, exchanging space and small courtesies without needing words.
The jasmine stayed with us all the way down.
There is a kind of intimacy in Singapore that does not ask to be named. It lives in shared lifts, wet-market queues, void decks after rain, and the hush before offices open. We are often near one another without entering one another’s lives. We know the shape of someone’s morning without knowing their name: the schoolbag, the lunch container, the coffee order, the careful silence.
I used to think intimacy required conversation. Living here has taught me otherwise. Sometimes it is enough to share air kindly. To stand close without intrusion. To notice the steam from someone else’s tea and allow it to soften the hard edge of your own rushing.
The next time you wait for the lift in the morning, do not reach too quickly for your phone. Let the lobby be what it is: a small room of almost-strangers, each carrying a private day.
Breathe gently.
Someone’s jasmine may already be teaching you how to arrive.
