Consider (but do not mourn) how here, the old road met the curve of the hills heading north towards the abbreviations of bungalows scattered among the jungle like so many teeth, or there, south towards the hospital. At its fork, one sees the gradual straightening and unstraightening of years as one line is drawn over the other thicker anew while the other arches like my mother's spine, fluorescing under the dim glow of x-ray tubes, or, alternatively, hunched over the cracked screen of property listings on a smartphone. See how on the screen when you push the slider back, how the true shape of the road unhinges itself, going back, how it curls among the pixels, dear? There's a splitting where the water crosses, under which they dug a concrete tunnel to commemorate its passing, which can be made visible when you push the slider back up to 1945. A stripe of candy-coloured pixels that speaks the true shape of the land. From 1953 to 1975 you can pull the slider forth to see how the land has been cut in neat lines for my mother's house, which forks off the main road like the left half of a lung, the other half fanning out to where the rainforest is still green even today. There were shops along the road here, there are still shops here today. Our town is built on such symmetries whose orientation is dependent on the direction in which one cuts; transversally, as across the topography of the body in a CT scan; or vertically, down the spine, each vertebra a year, the slew of a trunk of a tembusu with every coming spring.