The platform screen said three minutes. I had missed an earlier train because I stopped to buy batteries at the shop outside the station — a purchase so small it hardly qualifies as a reason, yet reasons are what we use to explain gaps in otherwise straight lines. I stood near the middle doors where the air is slightly cooler and watched the tracks without expecting anything from them.
Then a child at the glass panel to my left began drawing. Not with ink — with finger pressure on the condensation that always forms on that section of barrier when the tunnel exhales cold air upward. Loops first, then a series of connected boxes that might have been buildings or might have been something else entirely. The child's mother looked at her phone and did not intervene. The drawings stayed because nobody wiped the glass.
My notebook was in my bag. The better map was on the glass.
I have kept notebooks for years and still cannot reproduce the confidence of those lines. Each loop closed. Each box touched the next without gap or overlap in the wrong places. There was no ruler, no eraser, no second draft. The child worked at the speed of someone who has not yet learned that first attempts are supposed to be provisional.
I thought about my scrap-paper maps at home — the ones with corners torn where I restarted a street, the ones with question marks at intersections I could not resolve. Commonwealth MRT appears on many of them as a circle with an east-west line through it, because that is how the system map presents it. Clean geometry. Nothing like the soft, disappearing architecture on the glass beside me.
A train entered the tunnel before arriving; the wind lifted lightly at ankle height. The child's boxes smudged on one edge where a sleeve brushed the panel. The child frowned, not devastated — recalibrating — and drew a new box overlapping the smudge, incorporating the blur into the design. I have never once incorporated a blur into my own maps. I treat blur as failure.
When the train doors opened, the mother stood and took the child's hand. The glass remained marked with partial cityscapes that would evaporate once the platform warmed. I boarded and found a seat facing the map above the door — the official version, teal lines on grey, every station named and every interchange marked with symbols that mean certainty.
I rode one stop to Queenstown and back because I had nowhere urgent to be. On the return passage the glass had been wiped clean. No loops, no boxes, no evidence except in my memory, which is already an unreliable archive. I wrote the observation on my phone notes app at the next platform wait: child drew where I fail to draw. The phrasing embarrassed me slightly. I revised it to: patterns on glass outlast my paper by exactly three minutes. Still not exact, but closer to the signal I wanted to keep.
Commonwealth MRT at off-peak hours has a particular echo — footsteps spaced far apart, the hum of escalators running empty, announcements that sound louder than they need to. I stood again at the same panel. Condensation was already re-forming in a thin film. I did not draw on it. Adult hesitation is its own kind of map, and mine says: do not mark what you cannot claim.
The next train arrived on time according to the screen. I got on with the note still open on my phone, unsaved in any permanent sense, which seemed appropriate for an entry about lines that disappear.