I woke up on a Sunday and decided to do something about it.

Not the cancer. I'd run out of things to do about that. Dr Nair had been honest with me at the last appointment, the particular honest that comes without softening, and I had sat in that chair and listened and nodded and come home and lain on the bed for a very long time looking at the ceiling. The options had narrowed. The numbers were not moving in the right direction. We were no longer talking about remission. We were talking about time, and comfort, and what I wanted the remaining of it to look like.

So not the cancer. That was being handled by people more qualified than me.

What I decided to do something about was the day.

I got up before anyone else. I showered slowly, which I did everything slowly now, the fatigue a constant negotiation between what I wanted to do and what my body would allow. I got dressed in something I liked. I went downstairs and made tea, two cups, and went and knocked on Kai's door at seven in the morning with both of them.

He answered in a t-shirt and the particular expression of someone who had been awake for a while but hadn't decided what to do about it yet. He looked at the two cups. He looked at me.

"We're going out," I said.

"Okay," he said. No questions. Just: okay.

"Get dressed. Nothing fancy. Bring your camera."

He looked at me for a moment. Something moved through his face that he kept to himself.

"Give me ten minutes," he said.

I had a list.

Not written down. I'd thought about writing it down and decided against it because writing it down would make it a list and I didn't want it to be a list. I wanted it to be a day. Just a day we were having. Just us, just Singapore, just the things I wanted to do before I couldn't do them anymore, without naming that last part out loud.

The first thing was the hawker centre near Tiong Bahru that Isha had taken me to weeks ago, the one that opened early and smelled of something frying from half a block away. We got there before the morning crowd, found a table in the corner, ordered things I pointed to because I still couldn't remember all the names. The coffee came in the old-fashioned way, in a small cup with condensed milk at the bottom that you stirred yourself, and I wrapped both hands around it the way Momma and Aunt Reneta held their cups, thumb through the handle and palm curved around the side, which I'd started doing without noticing.

Kai watched me do it.

"What," I said.

"Nothing," he said. "You do that thing with the cup."

"What thing."

"Both hands. Like you're holding onto it."

I looked down at my hands around the cup.

"My mum does it," I said. "Her sister too. I must have picked it up."

He looked at me with that expression of his, the one that meant he was filing something away carefully.

We ate. We talked. We watched the hawker centre fill up around us, the morning crowd arriving with the particular efficiency of people who knew exactly what they wanted and had wanted it every morning for years. An old man at the table beside us was reading a Chinese newspaper, his coffee going cold. Two women in matching scrubs were eating quickly, clearly between shifts. A small child in a school uniform was eating something that was definitely not a school-appropriate breakfast while her father looked at his phone and pretended not to notice.

I watched all of it.

I was trying to memorise it. Not the specific details, because memory didn't work like that, I knew — it kept some things and lost others for reasons that had nothing to do with how hard you tried. But the texture of it. The quality of a Tuesday morning in a hawker centre, the particular kind of ordinary that you didn't notice until you were aware it might be the last time you sat in it.

"Hey," Kai said.

I looked at him.

"Stay here," he said. Gently.

"I am here," I said.

"You were leaving for a minute."

I looked at him across the table, this person who could tell when I was going somewhere in my head without me saying a word.

"I'm back," I said.

"Good," he said. He reached across and touched the back of my hand briefly. "Eat your breakfast."

I ate my breakfast.

The second thing was the Botanic Gardens.

We'd been before, both of us separately and once together, early on, before everything had weight. Going back felt deliberate in a way I couldn't explain without explaining too much, so I didn't explain it and he didn't ask.

We walked slowly, which was the only speed I had now. He matched it without comment, his pace entirely adjusted to mine, the camera around his neck. The morning was already warm but not yet hot, the light coming through the canopy at an angle that did something specific to the colour of everything, the green going almost gold where it caught.

I stopped at the same spot I'd stopped the first time. The wide path where the trees opened up. He stopped beside me.

"This is where we were," he said. "The first time we came."

"Yeah."

"You went very still."

"I do that."

"I know," he said. "I like it."

I looked at him.

"Why?"

He thought about it seriously. "Because it means you're really seeing something. Most people look and keep moving. You actually stop."

I turned back to the trees.

"Take a photo," I said. "Of this. Not me. Just this."

He lifted the camera and I heard the quiet click of it. Then another.

"Done," he said.

"Send them to me later."

"Yeah."

We kept walking. He took photos of things as we went, here and there, unhurried. A section of tree root that had cracked the path and grown over it. An old man doing tai chi in a clearing, very slow, very precise. Two birds arguing over something in the grass that from where we stood appeared to be nothing.

"What are you going to do with all of them," I said. "The photos."

"Put them somewhere," he said. "I don't know yet. There's a project in it. I can feel it but I can't see it fully yet."

"You'll figure it out."

"Yeah," he said. And then, quietly: "Some of them are of you."

I kept walking.

"I know," I said.

"Is that okay."

I thought about the girl in the green dress looking at the water. The photo on my phone that I'd looked at more times than I'd admitted to anyone.

"Yeah," I said. "It's okay."

He didn't say anything more about it. We walked through the rest of the gardens in the warm morning, not talking much, just moving through the green of it together, and I tried to hold the texture of it, the smell of growing things and the sound of the city just beyond the trees and the specific quality of his company, which I had never been able to describe properly and didn't try to now.

We stopped for a while on a bench near the bandstand, in the shade, because I needed to. He sat close. Our shoulders touched. He had his camera in his hands and was looking through the shots he'd taken, scrolling slowly.

"Show me," I said.

He tilted the camera screen toward me.

The tai chi man, caught mid-movement, one arm extended, the light behind him. The birds. The tree roots. And then one I hadn't known he was taking, of me, from the back, standing at the spot where the trees opened up, looking into the garden.

"That one," I said.

"Yeah," he said.

We looked at it together. The green dress again, though it was just a sundress today, and the slight angle of my head, and the particular set of my shoulders. The same quality as the rooftop photo. Someone paying attention. Someone trying to hold onto something.

"I want a copy of that one," I said.

"You'll have it," he said.

I leaned my head against his shoulder. He put his arm around me.

We sat for a while. The garden moved around us, other people passing on the path, a group of school children in the distance with a harassed-looking teacher, a runner going by with the determined expression of someone racing their own mind. The world doing what the world did, going on, carrying everyone with it.

"Kai," I said.

"Yeah."

I wanted to say: I'm glad it was you. Out of everyone it could have been, on that plane, in that seat, in this city, I'm glad it was you.

I wanted to say: you've been one of the best parts of this. Not a consolation, not a silver lining I was supposed to find. Just genuinely, straightforwardly, one of the best things.

I wanted to say: I'm sorry about what's coming. I'm sorry I can't give you more time. I'm sorry you're going to have to carry this and I won't be here when it's heavy.

What I said was: "Thank you for coming today."

He pressed his lips to the top of my head.

"Thank you for asking me," he said.

We sat there a little longer.

The third thing was the waterfront.

We walked along the Marina Bay promenade in the early afternoon, the water beside us, the city arranged along the other side like it was showing off. My legs were tired by this point, the day catching up with me, but I wasn't ready to stop, not yet, and Kai knew it and didn't suggest it.

We stopped at a railing and looked out at the water for a while.

"When I first got here," I said, "I looked out at this city from a taxi window at six in the morning and I thought — okay. Like it was an answer to something. I didn't know what the question was yet but I thought, okay, here we go."

"And now?" he said.

I looked at the water.

"I still think okay," I said. "Just — a different kind. Less beginning. More."

I stopped. I didn't have the word for it.

"More like something completed," he said quietly.

I looked at him.

"Yeah," I said. "Something like that."

He was looking at the water. His jaw was tight in the way it got when he was holding something together from the inside. I'd learned that about him. The tells he didn't know he had.

"Hey," I said.

He looked at me.

His eyes were bright. He didn't hide it.

I reached up and put my hand against his face. He turned into it slightly, the way you do when something steadies you.

"I love you," I said. Not the first time now. Just another time. One of the times.

"I love you," he said. His voice was rough but steady.

We stayed at the railing for a while longer, both of us looking at the water, the city behind us, the afternoon light making everything very clear and very bright in the way it did before the day started to go.

Eventually we took a taxi home.

He didn't ask about the list. He didn't ask what the day had been for. He just came and was in it with me, every part of it, entirely present, which was, I had come to understand, exactly the kind of person he was.

Back at Aunt Reneta's, I went upstairs and lay down while Kai went to his house and Isha brought me tea I didn't ask for and sat on the end of the bed not talking, which was how Isha showed love, by being present without requiring anything from the presence.

I lay there and looked at the ceiling and took stock of the day.

The hawker centre. The coffee with both hands. The Botanic Gardens and the photo of me from the back. The bench in the shade and the things I'd said and the things I hadn't. The waterfront, the water, the different kind of okay.

I picked up my phone.

The photo from the garden was already there. He'd sent it while I was resting. The girl from the back, standing in the green, the light coming through the trees above her.

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I opened a new note on my phone and I started writing.

Not a list.

A letter.

I wrote for a long time. The light moved across the room as the afternoon went toward evening, and Isha slipped out at some point without disturbing me, and outside the mynah made its case to the neighbourhood as it always did, unbothered and persistent and entirely itself.

I wrote until I had said everything I wanted to say.

Then I put the phone face down on the bed and closed my eyes.

Outside, Singapore went on.

I let it.