The First Quiet Hour

This new year, let's remember that life's in the little things.

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Morning had just broken, but Elsie found her thoughts tracing the kitchen floor.  

The first hour of the year was calm, quiet - giving room for pause. Singapore was still, but her apartment was buzzing with the noise of leftover wrappers, party poppers and half-finished cans of beer from the New Year's Eve party the night before. 

A cuckoo bird and its mate did a series of hops on the railing, as if filling the small gaps between the noise. A park lamp flickered, looking bent, as if conforming to the weight of the prior year's unseen moments.

She strolled to the corner coffeeshop, giving silent nods to people she knew only briefly. Each step she took was a checklist of micro-decisions - taking the scenic route past the river, choosing which text message to reply to, skipping her usual cafe stop because it was too crowded. The new year was a mirror of the year before. The choices she made then rippled quietly into today.

She found herself seated on a park bench at lunch, the flavour of new year leftovers absent on her tongue. Her mind wandered as clouds drifted idly; children laughed, their chuckles filling the void in her soul.

She knew that void. The emptiness of life's unnoticed textures -children's laughter, an elderly woman's chuckle-trumped the resolutions she made a year earlier. The pause before laughter was a reminder that the thought put into laughter - the little details - mattered as much as the laughter itself. Awareness in life's small acts is what made a difference. 

She returned to her apartment, opened a few letters she'd ignored over the new year and sipped her now rancid tea. 

But for the first time in a long while, she felt as if she mattered. The clock on the TV console ticked steadily, indifferent to her presence. But she felt -there. Unrushed, with no need to know what happened next. She had already arrived.

She dialled her mother's number, ready to finally speak to her.

Ready to address the spat they'd had a few weeks earlier.

Ready to meet the year ahead. 

Because she was in the moment. 

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Original muse by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental.

For Mikeydred's January Dollar Prompt