I Should Have Named My Daughter Kaduk

I don't remember the name of the flower I named my daughter after. Which means I don't remember my daughter's name anymore. I don't know if it still grows wild anywhere in Singapore. I don't think it does. I don't see anything growing wild along the grass patches and trees that line every road I walk along when I take my nightly walks. I don't see the thin curls and wisps of kenanga petals or the pinwheels of a kemboja, nor do I smell the fragrance of melati. My daughter says that I'm just being silly, that of course such things still grow in Singapore, and that she's seen them herself. I don't remember her name, so I don't respond.

I no longer sleep at night. Not that time has much meaning for me anymore. Not at my old age and not now, with my memory failing me more with each day. I know I have sons, but I don't know how many. I have a daughter. I don't remember her name. The days blur into each other, and the nights startle me. They come out of nowhere. My block doesn't receive any west sun, which must have been great when my late husband and I first moved in here all those years ago, but now it bothers me that the blocks that surround mine shield me from the natural light of the setting sun. I can never anticipate when the sun might be setting or when the moon might be starting to make its slow, translucent ascent across the pale pink of the sunset before it shines brightly in the blue-black sea of the night. I only know it is night when suddenly it is dark, and instead of feeling sleepy, I get restless. I can't sleep at night. Not anymore.

A young girl sleeps inside me. I don't know who she is. Maybe she is me. I only see her on nights when I close my eyes to try and sleep, and instead of the familiar shower of dots and colors, I see her lying down, facing away from me. She gets the sleep that I don't. I sleep during the day when I make my slow walk down to the dialysis center, and they hook me up to the machine. I don't know how it works. I only know that it takes my blood out and puts it back in. I hear it. It sounds like the waves that I once heard from my village near the coasts of old Singapore. I don't know where the village would be now. I don't know if it would still be on the water. My blood moves in waves in and out of me. I hear my blood flow out of me, and I imagine the waves being pulled away from the shoreline by the power of the moon, and I hear them come back into me in relentless surges, crashing on the shores of my body, before they pull away again. And it repeats. Again and again. Pulling and crashing, ebbing and flowing, the moon yanking it back gently by its foam that gathers on its surface like dispersed clouds before sending it back into me in waves that break on the sand in my mind. I fell asleep to this sound as a child. I can only fall asleep to it now.

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My kids don't understand. I don't know how many kids I have. My daughter gets upset. She tells me not to go "wandering around" at night. I'm not wandering, I tell her. I know where I'm going. I go to the canals and longkangs and hope that there is rain that day. If there was, then the canal would be full of water like a giant snake, and it would slither toward the river, the ocean, or a larger canal. In its slow gyration, small waves, disturbances on the water's surface, not really waves, might form...