Walking the Quarry Edge at Little Guilin
I took the long way to Little Guilin on a Thursday afternoon when my flat felt too quiet and my head too loud. The quarry does not fix anything. It gives you space to hear yourself think without the MRT announcements.
I entered from Bukit Batok East Avenue side, past the joggers in school PE shirts and the uncle doing slow tai chi near the railing. The path dips and rises in a way that makes you aware of your knees if you are thirty-four and sit too much at work. I count steps sometimes. Not for fitness. For rhythm.
Little Guilin is a strange pocket of Singapore — granite cliffs dropped into a housing estate like a memory of harder ground. Tourists take photos at the lake edge. Residents treat it as a shortcut with better air. I am somewhere between: not a photographer, not in a hurry.
I walked the full loop, about forty minutes if you do not stop. I stopped often. There is a bench where you can see both the reflection and the real cliff at once, slightly misaligned, like two versions of the same place arguing quietly. I sat there and ate a peanut butter sandwich I had packed without enthusiasm and finished anyway.
A quarry is a subtraction that became a landmark. What was removed left a shape the city kept.
Two boys skipped stones. A woman filmed the water for what I assume was a product review — she held a bottle at the correct angle and spoke in a cheerful voice I could not fully hear. An old man fed fish though I am not sure fish should be fed there. I watched ripples expand and overlap until the surface forgot each disturbance. That was the part I wanted to remember.
I thought about work deadlines and did not solve them. I thought about my mother’s call on Sunday and made a mental note to visit next week. The quarry did not offer advice. It offered scale. My problems stayed the same size but felt smaller against granite that had been cut for decades.
On the way out I brushed against a low branch and carried a leaf in my shirt cuff without noticing until I was on the bus. I pressed it in my notebook — green, slightly torn, a trace of the loop. It will brown in a week. The walk will compress into "I went to Little Guilin" unless I write the details now: the misaligned reflection, the skipped stones, the bench angle, the leaf.
If you walk there on a weekday afternoon, you may see me on the quarry edge, not quite exercising, not quite resting. Reading the water like a line of text I have not finished deciphering.
On the bus home I wrote the bench coordinates in my phone — not GPS, just a description: third bench after the fork, facing the double reflection. Next month the foliage may hide the view. The note will still point me back.