Not enough room
15. A Man Who Has Never Spent a Saturday in His Own Apartment
He woke at seven without an alarm.
Lay there for a moment. The ceiling. The morning light already coming through the gap in the curtains. The particular quality of a Saturday morning that had nothing in it — no calls, no studio, no client, no width to maintain. No birds.
The carry-on was by the door. Packed last night in forty minutes, efficiently, the way he packed everything. The pineapple tarts in his mother’s careful layers beside it. The toiletry bag with the pills.
He got up. Made coffee. Stood at the window with it.
The city below was doing its Saturday morning thing — slower, the roads still quiet, the particular ease of a place that has permission to be less than fully operational for a few hours. He watched it for a while without thinking much.
Finished the coffee.
Put on shoes and went downstairs.
He walked without deciding where.
The neighborhood revealed itself at this pace, at this hour, in a way it hadn’t in two years of living here. He had driven through it mostly. Moved through it with somewhere to be, the roads a means between the apartment and the studio and the client and the restaurant and back again. The neighborhood as connective tissue rather than place.
On foot it was different.
The coffee shop on the corner had been there since before his building — he could tell by the way it sat, the older signage, the particular patina of a place that had watched everything around it get built and demolished and rebuilt and kept going anyway. Plastic chairs outside. Three old men with the newspaper. The smell of kaya toast and coffee that had been made the same way for thirty years.
He stopped.
Went in.
The uncle behind the counter looked at him without recognition — not unfriendly, just accurate. New face. He pointed at the kaya toast and held up two fingers and the uncle nodded and it arrived quickly, the bread thick and charred at the edges, the kaya cold from the fridge, the butter already melting into it.
He ate standing at the counter.
It tasted like Saturday. Like the particular combination of char and sweet and cold butter that belonged to this hour and this kind of morning and nothing more complicated than hunger met without ceremony.
He paid. Walked on.
Past the temple he’d noted the existence of without ever stopping. He stopped now. Not to go in. Just to stand at the entrance for a moment, the incense drifting out, the sound of something interior and quiet, the particular quality of a space that had been holding the same intention for decades.
He stood there until a woman with flowers brushed past him and went inside.
Then he walked on.
Past the market that was already winding down for the morning, the vegetable sellers packing up the unsold things with the practiced efficiency of people who did this every day and would do it again tomorrow. Past a playground empty of children at this hour, the swings moving slightly in something that wasn’t quite wind. Past a row of shophouses with the particular mix of old and new that Singapore did without trying — the ground floor renovated, the upper floors still original, the building neither one thing nor the other and not bothered about it.
He walked until the walking felt complete.
Then he turned and went home.
The afternoon arrived without agenda.
He sat with it for a moment — the slight vertigo of unstructured time, the background hum of the system looking for something to process, some task to begin, some width to maintain. He let it run. Watched it from the same distance he’d watched it from in the Guangzhou tea house.
It settled.
He ate what was in the fridge. Not much — he’d been eating out mostly, the fridge holding the particular inventory of a man who sleeps here and not much else. Eggs. Some leftover rice. He made something simple and ate it at the counter and it was enough.
Then he tried the stretches.
He’d read something — one of the forums, one of the biohacking threads, something about the relationship between chest tension and the muscles around the sternum, the intercostals, the way sustained stress lived in the cage around the heart rather than the heart itself. He’d filed it. Today seemed like the day to try.
He lay on the floor.
Found the positions from memory. Gentle at first — opening the chest, the arms wide, the shoulders pressing into the floor, the ribcage asked to expand beyond where it usually went.
He felt it immediately.
Not the ease he’d been expecting. Not release.
Soreness.
Deep and specific, the kind that lived in muscles that had been held contracted for so long they’d forgotten the other direction. He pressed slightly further. The soreness deepened. Not pain exactly — not the wrongness of something damaged. The soreness of something that had been bracing. That had been doing the holding quietly, without being asked, without complaint, without any of the drama that might have made him notice sooner.
He lay there and breathed into it.
The ceiling above him. The apartment quiet around him.
Lina’s text was still somewhere in him. He hadn’t re-read it. What you have now is a receipt. Not a beginning. He’d turned that over since Friday and what it did was remove a certain pressure — the pressure of having arrived somewhere, of needing to now act. The receipt wasn’t an instruction. It was just evidence of a transaction that had been accumulating for longer than he’d known.
He noticed he was also watching. Not just for the soreness. For the squeezing.
He thought about the studio.
It came — not sharp, not sudden. The familiar closing-in behind the sternum. He stayed with it. The studio, the width of it, the decisions and the maintaining and the particular exhaustion of building something that had looked like everything he’d wanted and had been, for most of it, a thing he’d kept operational rather than inhabited.
The squeezing stayed with the studio.
He thought about the flat. The car.
A quieter version — less pressure, more the quality of something held at a remove. The flat bought because the numbers worked. The couch chosen carefully for a room he’d slept in and not much else.
He reached toward his parents.
I tried to find them.
And there was nothing.
Not the squeezing. Not the soreness. Just a particular blankness, like pressing into a space and finding it muffled.
He stayed with the blankness. It wasn’t uncomfortable. It was just different.
He reached toward Karen.
The same. He held the position a moment longer, as if the opening of the chest might open something else. It didn’t.
He let it go.
He thought about Kenny. Something lighter — not the squeezing, just ease. The particular texture of a relationship that didn’t pull.
He breathed.
He thought about how long the muscles had been doing this. Months at least. Probably longer. The studio expanding, the width increasing, the responsibility accumulating — and somewhere underneath all of that the body quietly tightening its cage, pulling everything inward, protecting something it had decided needed protecting without consulting him about the decision.
He breathed.
The soreness didn’t leave. But it became more legible. Less like wrongness, more like information. This is where you’ve been holding it. This is what two years of not stopping has done to the muscles around your heart.
He tried another position. Then another.
He didn’t push toward the things that had gone quiet. He’d noted them.
After forty minutes he lay flat on his back with his arms at his sides and looked at the ceiling and felt the soreness settling into something more like acknowledgment. Not fixed. Just — known.
He’d been here two years.
The thought arrived simply, without drama.
Two years in this apartment. He tried to count the Saturdays he’d actually spent in it. Properly in it — not working from the couch, not killing time before somewhere else, not recovering from Friday and preparing for Monday. Saturdays that were just Saturdays. Afternoons that were just afternoons.
He couldn’t.
Not because there had been too many to count.
Because there had been almost none.
The apartment had been a place he returned to. A place he slept and stored his things and paid the loan for on the fifteenth. The view from the window. The print on the wall. The couch he’d chosen carefully. All of it chosen, all of it his, all of it waiting for him to actually live in it.
He hadn’t.
He’d been somewhere else the whole time.
The studio. The width. The responsibility. The pills keeping the edge accessible. The account that needed the Guangzhou trip. The meetings and the revisions and the client calls and the borrowed urgency that he’d generated and maintained and mistaken for a life.
He lay on the floor of his apartment on a Saturday afternoon.
Outside the neighbourhood continued its Saturday — slower, more itself, the permission to be less than fully operational still in effect.
He felt the soreness in his chest.
Felt the key in his pocket from the other day — he’d moved it to this pair of trousers without thinking, the weight of it becoming familiar.
Felt the particular quiet of a space that had his name on the lease and not much else of him in it.
Tomorrow: airport. Bangkok connection. Chiang Mai late afternoon.
Lina’s guest room. Her cooking. The scale of a human life.
Today: just this.
The floor. The soreness. The ceiling. The Saturday afternoon light moving slowly across the wall the way light moved when you were still enough to watch it.
He didn’t reach for his phone.
Didn’t open the laptop.
Didn’t look anything up.
Just lay there and let the apartment be what it was — a space he’d paid for and not inhabited — and let himself be what he was — a man on a floor on a Saturday, sore in the places he’d been holding, finally still enough to feel it.
The light moved.
The afternoon passed.
He slept before he meant to.
Woke at seven to the city doing its Saturday evening thing outside the window.
Got up. Drank water. Looked at the carry-on by the door.
Tomorrow.
He went to bed early for the first time in longer than he could remember and slept the way he hadn’t slept in months — not the grateful surrender of exhaustion, not the standby of a machine that needed to be operational by morning.
Just sleep.
His body finally somewhere it had permission to stop.