“This is an excerpt from my ongoing project, The Nurses’ Story [ chapter 35 ] — a personal narrative about friendship, identity, and the quiet transformations that shape us. It captures a moment between two friends reflecting on life, fear, and freedom during their nursing school days.”
The memories drifted in like soft echoes from a life I wasn’t sure belonged to me anymore.
“I still remember the first time I saw you,” she said suddenly, as if reading my thoughts.
“First day at the School of Nursing. You walked into the auditorium in that pale blue baju kurung, hijab pinned neatly under your chin. You looked so small, so… timid. The only Malay-Muslim girl in the entire intake.”
She smiled faintly, eyes distant with memory. “I made a bet with Junita, you know. Either you’d quit… or the baju kurung would.”
I laughed softly, shaking my head. “You really said that?”
“I did.” She grinned sheepishly. “Junita thought you wouldn’t last the first semester. I thought maybe you’d stay but that hijab wouldn’t.”
“You know,” I began carefully, “I never liked you when I first came across you. Especially during the PTS. You were so bossy like you had to show off.”
“I did?” She turned her head to look at me for the first time since we’d sat down.
“Yeah… maybe I was. I never really thought of it that way.”
“That’s why I kept my distance. And then, at Toa Payoh, when I found out we’d be roommates, it felt like a nightmare. I even asked for a change, but the supervisor said no. Truth is, nobody wanted to be in the same room with you.”
“Serious?” She burst out laughing. “I must’ve been that bad, eh?”
“I’d heard so much about you especially what happened at Alexandra Hostel. Gave me the impression you were really nasty.”
She looked amused. “I know who spread those stories… the leeches.”
“Hey, it’s not nice to call them that.”
“They are leeches. Anyway you stayed with me for almost four months. Did any of those stories turn out to be true?”
“Nope.”
“Nurhayati stayed with me at Changi Hostel too. Did you ask her?”
“Yes. She told me the same thing no issues.”
“Thank you,” she said with a satisfied grin. “I rest my case.”
For a moment, we sat in silence, the past hanging between us like a suspended thread.
“And yet here you are,” she said softly, studying my face. “Changed. Different. It’s like you’ve… shed something. But I can’t tell what. So tell me, Nithya. What happened?”
I stared at her, unsure where to begin. The weight of old secrets pressed against the edges of my thoughts, like waves lapping at a locked chest.
“It wasn’t one thing,” I said finally. “It was… everything. All at once. Little moments, little questions that kept piling up. Things I saw, things I felt. And one day, I woke up and realised the person I thought I was… wasn’t me anymore.”
She leaned in closer. “Give me one moment. Just one story.”
I hesitated, fingers tracing the rim of my glass, searching for the right fragment to offer her. So many memories buried, hidden, locked away not because they were shameful, but because they were mine alone.Then one surfaced, unbidden, like a shard of light breaking through water. I took a breath.
“Alright,” I said quietly. “There was a day… during PTS… when I thought I had everything figured out. And then something happened that cracked the ground under me. It wasn’t dramatic, not really. But it changed everything.”
She said nothing, just waited patient, steady, the kind of silence that draws words out rather than smothers them. And so, I began.
“It was a Saturday night, I’d heard about a religious discourse being held at one of the mosques in Geylang. I hadn’t attended one in years ever since I started nursing school, I stopped going. But that evening, I wasn’t working, had nowhere to be, and for some reason… I decided to go.” I paused, as if measuring my words.
“I went alone. The mosque was full, and there were several speakers lined up that night mostly locals, and one from Malaysia. I sat there for almost an hour, listening quietly, waiting to hear something… meaningful. But all I heard,” I said, shaking my head slowly, “were the same things, over and over. Male and female religious teachers alike, talking about infidels. About hating the Jews. About life after death and the punishments waiting for us if we strayed. Fire, torment, eternal suffering.”
I stopped, looking down at my hands. “And suddenly, I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Why?” she asked gently.
I gave a sighed. “Because in that moment, all I could think was… why? Why are we talking so much about death when we haven’t figured out how to live yet? Why are we obsessed with the afterlife while our own people are struggling to make sense of the present? Just look around us the problems our community faces, the poverty, the fractured families, the quiet despair. Shouldn’t we be talking about improving ourselves? Building something better? Why aren’t we talking about life?”
She nodded slowly. “Good point. Why talk about death when we haven’t yet grasped the meaning of living?”
I gave a faint, sad smile. “And it didn’t stop there. There was this constant condemnation of the ‘idol worshippers.’ Over and over, the same words: infidels, curses, punishment.”
My voice grew softer. “If you bring it to the current context… who are they talking about, really? Isn’t it the Chinese, the Hindus, the Buddhists? My friends?” I hesitated, my brows knitting together. “Why should I hate them? What have they done to us? These are the same people who’ve sat with me through exams, who’ve shared their food with me, who’ve stood by me when I needed help. And yet, sitting there, I was being told to see them as enemies. To fear them. To resent them.”
My voice faltered for a moment. “I didn’t like what I felt that night. I didn’t like the bitterness they were trying to plant inside me. I didn’t like the darkness of it this endless purging of hatred towards people who’d done me no harm.”
I let out a breath and didn’t realise that I was holding. “That was the moment something cracked in me. I walked out of the mosque that night… and I never went back.”
“It’s a good story,” she said thoughtfully. “And you’re right… you shouldn’t go back if you don’t feel comfortable with it.”
I nodded slightly, then hesitated before speaking. “You know… I once had an argument about this with someone.”
Her eyes lit up with curiosity. “About what?”I leaned forward, my voice quieter now. “I asked a fellow Muslim girl to imagine this scenario: You’re in the hospital. Two patients collapse at the same time. One’s a Muslim, the other isn’t. Both need urgent help. Who would you save first?”
She frowned, leaning back in her chair. “What did she say?”
“She didn’t even hesitate,” I said softly. “She said she would choose the Muslim patient.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.” I paused, letting the weight of it settle between us.
“So I asked her, ‘Why? Why choose the Muslim, when you know based on everything we’ve been trained for the other patient actually needs immediate attention first?’”
She hook her head slowly, the memory still raw. “That’s when it hit me how deeply we’ve been conditioned to draw lines where there shouldn’t be any. Shouldn’t our decisions, especially when it comes to human life, go beyond race and religion? Shouldn’t compassion come first?”
The silence that followed was thick, but not uncomfortable. It was the kind of silence where both of us were turning over the same thought: what it really means to be human, beyond labels and divisions.
“You see,” she began softly, her gaze thoughtful, “I often ask myself the same questions too. If I were thrown into that same scenario two patients collapse at the same time, one Muslim and one not which patient would I choose first?”
I tilted my head. “And who would you choose?”
She gave a small, weary smile. “That’s the thing… I don’t know. I honestly don’t. And I wonder what my actions would reveal about me in that moment.”
She paused, then added quietly, “But I do know this as long as I carry my religion inside me, I will always be subject to its conditions. Sometimes I ask myself: will these conditions become walls? Will they limit my view of what’s right? Can I truly be open with myself, and with the people under my care?” She exhaled slowly, as though releasing something heavy.
“That’s why I avoid discussing belief or religion,” she continued. “Everyone’s relationship with God is private and personal. I’ve come to think… why should religion matter in our nursing practice at all, especially if it risks compromising our duty of care? When I put on this uniform, I leave myself behind. I don’t exist as me anymore I exist as what I represent: a nurse. And that makes it easier to make the hard decisions.”
Her voice dropped lower, tinged with something deeper not regret, but transformation.
“Everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve experienced… it’s changed me. I don’t see people, religion, or even God the same way anymore.”
She glanced at me, her expression softening.“That’s why, when I put on this uniform, I leave myself behind. I become… nobody. No religion. No politics. No affiliations. Just what I represent. And you know what? It feels good. Nobody can touch you when you’re nobody.”
She smiled faintly, a quiet light in her eyes.“
After a while,” she said, “this identity takes over. You don’t just wear the uniform you become it. Like a dancer who becomes the dance, or a painter who becomes the painting. And to me… that’s what life is all about. Losing yourself in what you do. Becoming it.”
Her words hung in the air between us, soft but powerful a philosophy born not from books or sermons, but from lived experience.“
In HDU, I’ve seen many things,” I began softly, my voice low, steady, but carrying a weight beneath it. “Perhaps the same things you’ve seen in ICU. I cleaned patients, suctioned them, turned their bodies to prevent bedsores. I performed passive exercises on comatose patients, trying to stop their muscles from stiffening into contractures. I did all of it because that’s what we’re trained to do. Sometimes, I think it helps. Sometimes, I’m not so sure. And I can’t help asking myself… am I also one of the culprits? Inflicting pain on people while trying to care for them, trying to keep them alive.”
My voice dropped even lower. “Just the other day, I did last offices on a man. Forty years old. I’ve done last offices many times before, but… this one affected me so much.”
“Why?” She asked gently.
I drew in a slow breath, to steadying myself. “He was admitted for a gastrectomy. I was the one who admitted him to the ward. I oriented him, prepared him for surgery, sent him to the operating theatre. I fetched him back from OT, nursed him in HDU… and in the end, I was the one who performed the last offices on him.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and my voice faltering. “For a while, I wanted to pretend I didn’t feel anything. To detach. To tell myself he was just another patient, just a name on a file. But when I saw his young wife and children standing there…”
My words trailed off and swallowed hard before continuing. “It broke something in me. I went home, locked myself in my room, and cried the whole evening.”
She reached out and touched my hand lightly. “I understand what you mean.” Her gaze drifted, unfocused, somewhere far beyond us.
“I thought maybe going back to the religious discourses would help. Maybe I’d find comfort, answers, anything. But every time I sat there, all I heard was vengeance, hatred, and this endless obsession with life after death. Punishments. Judgments. Fire and brimstone.”
I turned back to her, my voice quiet but heavy. “Why don’t they talk about living instead? Why don’t they talk about how to make this lifetime more meaningful without all those stories of punishment and fear? Why can’t we talk about life before death?”
“Well,” she began softly, her tone calm but deliberate, “you see… we’re living or rather, we’ve been brought up in a culture of fear. From young, our minds are carefully shaped with it, constructed layer by layer. And all these stories about life after death?”
She gave a faint shrug. “In my opinion, they’re designed to invoke that fear. To make us act, to make us obey, to make us become something we never questioned.” She paused, her gaze drifting somewhere distant. “The thing is, unless we acknowledge and reconcile this fear, we’ll never be free from it. It’s been woven so deeply into us that it becomes invisible. We start doing everything even the good things because of fear.”
She glanced at me briefly, then continued, her voice quiet but steady. “And sometimes, we’re so terrified of our own fear that we numb ourselves to it. We deaden our hearts. We deaden our minds. We build these walls inside our heads walls made of familiar thoughts, safe ideas, unquestioned beliefs. We hide behind them, thinking nothing can touch us.”
She drew in a slow breath, her expression thoughtful. “It’s like hiding in our personal caves and jungles, keeping the doors bolted shut. We don’t let any light in. And until something inside us shifts until we begin longing for openness, yearning for something beyond the echoes of our own thoughts no light will ever enter.”
I turned to look at her. She looked serious, her expression distant, her gaze fixed on the empty field ahead. There was a stillness about her, as though she were speaking from somewhere deep inside herself.
“Care to tell me more about what you just said?”
She nodded slowly. “I’ve been thinking.”
“About?”
“The fear factor,” she said softly. “I keep wondering why we carry so much fear inside us. And I think… it’s because our minds are never free from the weight of our past. Everything we do our actions, our choices, even the way we see the world is coloured by our past experiences. That’s what creates our conditioning.”
I tilted my head. “So… you’re asking if we can escape it?”
She looked at me steadily. “Exactly. Can we ever free the mind from its conditioning?”
I smiled faintly. “Hmm… you tell me. Can we?”
She leaned back, thoughtful, before speaking again. “Imagine the mind as a vessel a jar, a bowl, whatever you like holding everything we’ve ever experienced. To be truly free, we’d need to empty it completely. Only when the vessel is truly empty can we receive something fresh, something pure.”
She paused, her hands gesturing lightly as though shaping the idea in the air. “It’s like milk. If you collect fresh milk in a vessel that still holds stale milk, the new milk will spoil. No matter how pure it was to begin with, the remnants of the old will pollute it. And it’s the same with the mind as long as we hold onto the leftovers of the past, the new can never stay pure.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So… can it be done?”
She turned to me, her voice quiet, almost a whisper. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t know. I’ve been searching for the answer… but I haven’t found it yet.”
I studied her for a moment, seeing the weight of her thoughts reflected in her eyes.
“Oh,” I said softly, because there was nothing else to say. She leaned back, staring at the open field ahead, her voice softer now but edged with clarity.
“But then again,” she said slowly, “do I even want my mind to be like a vessel? Always having this need to empty itself just to make space for something new? A vessel is, after all, limited. It can only hold so much before it overflows.”
She turned to look at me briefly before letting her gaze drift again. “Knowledge isn’t like that. It’s not something you can collect and store away. Knowledge is… abundance. It’s like the flow of a river continuous, ever-changing, never-ending.”
Her fingers traced patterns on the table absentmindedly as she spoke, her words gaining quiet conviction.“
So maybe the real problem isn’t what we put into the vessel… maybe it’s the vessel itself. We keep trying to contain life, to control it, to hold it still but we can’t. We shouldn’t. If the mind is like a vessel, it will always be limited. But if the mind is like the river flowing, open, unbound only then can we truly experience the wonders of the world. Only then can we grasp the beauty of the nature of knowledge.”
She fell silent after that, as though her words were still rippling through her own thoughts. The quiet around us deepened, carrying the weight of her reflection.
I just stared at her, blinking slowly. Her words were still hanging in the air : fear, conditioning, the vessel, smashing the vessel, becoming the river all swirling together like a whirlpool in my head. My brain was working overtime, trying to piece everything together, but the more I tried, the more tangled it felt. It was as if every new idea collided with the next, sparking little flashes of thought until I could almost hear a faint buzzing in my ears.
“A river,” I repeated softly under my breath, as though testing the word. The image was beautiful, but also dizzying. How could I be a river when I still felt trapped inside my own vessel?
I forced a small laugh, shaking my head slightly.
“You know,” I said finally, “I think my brain is… short-circuiting.”
She smiled knowingly but said nothing, letting the silence do its work. And in that silence, I realised something I couldn’t yet put into words that maybe, just maybe, this confusion was the beginning of something new.
“You know what I feel like doing?” she said suddenly, breaking the silence.
I turned to look at her, suspicious.
“What?”
“Sing.” I blinked.
“Huh?” She grinned.
“Come on, let’s sing. Any particular song you like? I’ll sing it for you.”
I stared at her as though she’d lost her mind. “You’re out of your mind. What will people think if they hear us singing?”
“What’s wrong with it?” she shot back, feigning innocence. “Nothing on the signboard says we can’t sing. It’s a public space. Besides…” She waved a hand around the empty grounds. “Look around. There’s nobody here. This whole stadium is deserted except for the two of us.”
I tilted my head towards the left and pointed. “Yeah, but look over there.” A few HDB blocks rose in the distance, windows glowing faintly in the night. “People can see us from there. Somebody’s going to grab a pair of binoculars and wonder what the two of us are up to.”
She leaned closer, mischief dancing in her eyes. “Oh, they’ll assume we’re two lesbians having or about to have a jolly good time. Shall we give them a show? Let’s give them what they want to see.”
I gasped, half laughing, half scandalised. “You’re mad, you know that?”
She laughed loudly, the sound echoing faintly through the empty stadium, then gave me a playful punch on the arm. “Come on, forget about them. If they want to peep, let them. We’re not doing anything illegal. So…”
She straightened up, brushing imaginary dust off her lap. “…if you can’t think of a song, I’ll sing one of my favourites. I don’t even know the singer’s name, but I love it.”
She sat upright, inhaled deeply, and then, in the quiet of the deserted stadium, began to sing softly. Her voice floated gently into the night air, fragile and tender, as though the song belonged only to the two of us.
Her voice rose softly, clear against the still night:
“Once upon a time, there was a tavern… Where we used to raise a glass or two… Remember how we laughed away the hours… Think of all the great things we would do…”
I smiled as recognition washed over me.
“Ah! Of course I know this song!” I whispered, though I didn’t know all the lyrics. I’d heard her sing it so many times back at the SGH hostel. I waited for the part I knew, then joined her, both of us swaying slightly:
“Di di di di di di… Di di di di di di… Di di di di di di di di di di…”
She leaned back, eyes half-closed, and continued:
“Those were the days, my friend… We thought they'd never end… We'd sing and dance forever and a day… We'd live the life we’d choose… We’d fight and never lose… For we were young and sure to have our way…”
The lyrics drifted into the night like a bittersweet memory. The empty stadium around us seemed to hold its breath as her voice carried on:
“Then, the busy years went rushing by us… We lost our starry notions on the way… If, by chance, I'd see you in the tavern… We’d smile at one another and we’d say…”
And again, we slipped into the chorus together, our voices mingling with laughter:
“Those were the days, my friend… We thought they'd never end… We'd sing and dance forever and a day…”
By the final verse, neither of us cared if we were off-key or if anyone could hear us. It wasn’t about the song anymore it was about the moment. Two friends, young and untethered, clinging to the fragments of dreams and possibilities.
And that’s how we ended the night — two girls, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, climbing over the stadium gate like a pair of delinquents escaping curfew.
The metal was cold beneath our hands, and our laughter echoed through the deserted space, louder than the creak of the fence. We didn’t care if our skirts caught or if someone saw us. We didn’t care about rules, or fear, or what anyone thought.
We were singing: “Di di di di di di… Di di di di di di… Di di di di di di di di di di…”
We walked together until we reached the bus stop, where she turned towards home just around the corner while I waited for the feeder bus to Tampines. She waved, blowing me a playful flying kiss before continuing down the street, still humming, unconcerned about the people staring as she passed them.
I watched her until she disappeared from view, her voice lingering faintly in the night air.
