Thursday, Old Ground Revisited

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAn early start today, the sort that gets ahead of the traffic rather than negotiating with it, which made a pleasant change after the week's earlier skirmishes with the roads. There was a procedure scheduled for mid-morning, the kind of thing that demands a particular sort of focus — narrow, contained, no room for the mind to wander off and check on the rest of the day.

Lunch afterwards was quick, more habit than event, followed by an equally brisk ward round, the two of them dispatched together with the efficiency of someone who had somewhere else rather pressing to be. That somewhere was Wangsa Maju, a trip out to the lawyers to collect some documents, the sort of errand that sounds simple in the abstract and always takes slightly longer in practice.

I parked at Wangsa Walk Mall, which gave the whole outing an unexpected undertow of nostalgia. Old stomping ground, that — back when the boys were small and school runs still governed the shape of the week. Anita used to while away the hours there with the other mothers, waiting out the school day in the sort of unhurried company that seems, in retrospect, to belong to an entirely different pace of life. The mall hadn't changed much, structurally speaking, but it was busy in a way that felt newer, more purposeful, less like a waiting room and more like a destination in its own right. Strange, how a place can hold its shape and still feel like it's moved on without you.

I didn't linger longer than the errand required, documents collected and back on the road before the afternoon could get any ideas about traffic. Home came with an early dinner, the evening arranged around getting ahead of tomorrow rather than settling into tonight — packing for an overnight trip to Kota Bharu, leaving straight after work, which gave the whole evening a faint air of preparation rather than rest.

There's a particular rhythm to packing for somewhere brief, everything pared down to essentials, nothing indulgent, the sort of packing that's really just a list with clothes attached. It didn't take long, though the act of doing it always seems to sharpen the awareness that tomorrow will be a longer day than most, work first and then straight into travel, with whatever rest is going wedged in somewhere between the two.

Looking back at the day, it had a good shape to it — brisk where it needed to be, unexpectedly reflective in the middle, practical at the end. Wangsa Walk Mall wasn't on the agenda when the day began, and yet it ended up being the part that lingered longest, the way old places sometimes insist on being noticed even when you've only popped in for paperwork.

Bag's packed, documents collected, procedure and rounds behind me. Kota Bharu tomorrow. For tonight, that's quite enough.