Row, row, row my boat

On Friday, Lin Kiat and I rented kayaks and went out to sea, just off Sentosa Island. Okay, it wasn't as dramatic as it sounds - it wasn't as much sea as it was lagoon. The sea was cordoned off and we were allowed to row only within a lagoon formed by some mini man-made islands.

Of course, I made sure I rowed as closely as possible to the edge where the safe area ended and the forbidden began. The waves were stronger and the water darker. I basked in those moments, looking out to the large ships and to the point where the sea met the sky, feeling the kayak sway and dangling one foot over the orange plasic side. My arms were busy trying to keep my small boat steady but my attention was on the horizon. Which really was Indonesia, but for some minutes, my mind - fitted with a romantic antenna that afternoon - tuned in to an imagined vision of endless ocean and sky and perhaps some strange island that beckoned me to its shores. I recalled the scene in the movie Contact, the one in which Jodie Foster's character had landed finally in Vega and contemplated twin moons, falling stars and translucent sands that glinted in that beautiful Vegan light. "They should have sent a poet," she said.

Eventually, I shook off my reverie and rowed to calmer waters, and to a spot by a bridge. There, Lin Kiat told me to look hard for some small fish. I found them, tiny slivers of grey in the murky green water. I wondered at the smallness of the creatures, and their place in the large space that the ocean is. "No words," Eleanor Arroway had said in Contact. I had no words either as I slowly dipped my fingers into the water, slightly in awe of the teeming life beneath my boat and the world I could never really explore.