𝗔𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻, your wallet is plastic. Blue. There’s a cartoon character on the front that you can’t remember now but could describe perfectly then.
The Velcro makes a sound when you open it, a ripping that feels important, like opening something official.
Inside: ang pow money. Two red notes. $20.
You’ve been carrying them since Chinese New Year, three months ago, and you haven’t spent a single cent because your mother said “save it” and saving it is what you do when you’re seven and your mother’s word is law.
The wallet sits in your school bag. You check it every morning the way adults check their phones.
It’s still there. The $20 is still there. You are rich and you are seven and the world fits inside a plastic wallet with a cartoon character on the front.
𝗔𝘁 𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗹𝘃𝗲, the wallet is nylon. Still Velcro. Black this time because you’re too old for cartoons.
Inside: your EZ-Link card, loaded with $10 by your father on the first of every month. A $2 note for recess, folded into a square. A class photo from Primary Six, all forty-three of you in rows, squinting at the sun, wearing uniforms that are too big because your mother bought them a size up so you’d “grow into them.”
You carry the wallet in your front pocket now. Not the bag. The pocket.
Because the pocket is where men carry wallets and you are twelve and becoming a man and the wallet in the pocket is the first evidence.
𝗔𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗻, the wallet is canvas. Army green, bought from Beach Road before enlistment.
Inside: your 11B IC, the one with the photo where you look like someone who hasn’t slept in three days, which is accurate because you haven’t. Your SAF card. A $50 note that has to last until the next pay parade, which is nine days away, and you’ve already spent $20 at the canteen and the minimart and the math is getting tight.
And a photo. A girl.
She’s in JC. You met her at a friend’s birthday party three weeks before you enlisted. You haven’t told your parents about her.
The photo is tucked behind the SAF card where the sergeant won’t find it during inspection.
The wallet smells like boot polish and 4th floor corridor and the specific humidity of a bunk in Tekong where forty boys sleep and none of them sleep well.
𝗔𝘁 𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘆-𝗳𝗶𝘃𝗲, the wallet is leather for the first time. Brown.
Your father gave it to you on the day you graduated. He didn’t wrap it. He just handed it to you in the car park after the ceremony and said “use this one” and you understood that the giving of a leather wallet from a father to a son is one of those transactions that doesn’t require a card or a speech.
Just the object. Just the hand.
Inside: your NRIC. An ATM card. One credit card, your first, with a limit so low it barely qualifies as credit. A $50 note folded behind the cards for emergencies.
And a condom you’ve been carrying since twenty-three, which has outlasted two relationships and is now probably expired but you keep it because removing it would mean admitting something about your current situation that you’re not ready to admit.
The wallet is stiff. The leather hasn’t softened yet. It sits in your back pocket and leaves an imprint on your trousers.
You don’t mind. The imprint feels adult. The imprint says: I carry things now. I have things to carry.
𝗔𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘆-𝘁𝘄𝗼, the wallet is the same one your father gave you. The leather has softened. The corners are rounding. The colour has darkened from brown to something closer to the shade of kopi-o.
Inside: three credit cards. Your company pass. Two business cards you keep meaning to throw away. An EZ-Link card you rarely use because you drive now. Your NRIC.
And behind all the cards, folded twice because the wallet isn’t wide enough, your daughter’s ultrasound photo. The one from week twelve, the first scan, the grainy black-and-white image where the doctor circled a shape and said “that’s the heartbeat” and you squinted and saw nothing and then saw everything and your wife squeezed your hand.
You put the photo in your wallet before you put it anywhere else.
And the condom is gone. The $50 emergency note is gone. The photo of the girl from JC is gone.
And you don’t remember removing any of them. They just left, one by one, replaced by insurance cards and loyalty cards and the ultrasound of a person who will eventually carry a wallet of their own.
𝗔𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘆-𝗳𝗶𝘃𝗲, the wallet is too thick.
You carry too many cards. Loyalty cards for shops you visit once a year. A gym membership you stopped using in March. Business cards from people whose names you’ve forgotten.
You keep meaning to clean it out. You never do.
Because cleaning out a wallet feels like admitting that some of the things you’ve accumulated don’t matter anymore, and admitting things don’t matter is harder at forty-five than it was at twenty-five because at twenty-five the wallet was filling up and at forty-five it should be, but the filling feels different now.
Less like building. More like clinging.
The ultrasound is still there. Faded. The crease from the folding has cut through the image. You can barely see the circle the doctor drew.
But you keep it because the baby in the photo is now thirteen and taller than your wife and has started rolling her eyes when you talk, and the ultrasound is the proof that she was once a heartbeat the size of a peanut on a screen in a clinic, and that version of her still needs you, even if the current version pretends she doesn’t.
𝗔𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝗳𝘁𝘆-𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁, the wallet is thinner.
Two credit cards instead of four. The gym card is gone. The business cards are gone.
You retired last year, or maybe the company retired you, the phrasing depends on the day. The company pass went into a drawer and hasn’t come out.
What’s left: NRIC. ATM card. CHAS card.
A company medical card that expired when you left, which you keep meaning to throw away but haven’t because throwing it away would mean the job is really over, and the job was yours for twenty-six years, and twenty-six years doesn’t fit in a bin.
And the photo. Not the ultrasound. You moved the ultrasound to a frame on the bookshelf years ago.
The photo now is your wife. A holiday in Cameron Highlands, 1993. She’s laughing.
You took the photo on a disposable camera and got it developed at the shop in Katong and it’s been in your wallet for over thirty years.
The colours have gone soft. The edges are round. There’s a crease down the middle that runs through her face from all the times the wallet has been sat on, but you’d never move the photo to a frame because the frame is for display and the wallet is for carrying.
And you want to carry her, not display her.
𝗔𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘆-𝘁𝘄𝗼, the wallet barely closes.
Not because it’s full. Because the leather is so soft it’s lost its structure, the way a handshake loses its grip, the way a voice loses its volume.
The fold is trained. The pocket has moulded around it. The wallet and the pocket have become the same shape from thirty years of sitting together, and separating them at this point would feel like surgery.
Inside: almost nothing. NRIC. One ATM card. The CHAS card.
And her. Still there. Still laughing in Cameron Highlands. Still 1993.
The photo is so worn that a stranger wouldn’t know what it was. But you know.
You know the angle of her head. The way her hair falls across her left eye. The laugh that came from something you said, something you’ve forgotten, something that doesn’t matter because the laugh is what survived.
And you hold the wallet differently now. Not in the back pocket. In the front.
Because your hip hurts when you sit on it and because the front pocket keeps it closer to your hand and your hand, at seventy-two, reaches for the wallet more often. Not for money. For the photo.
You take it out at the coffeeshop when the kopi uncle is busy and you’re waiting alone. You hold it between your thumb and forefinger and you look at her and you don’t say anything because there’s nothing to say that the photo doesn’t already hold.
𝗔𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘆-𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁, the wallet is in your son’s hand.
He found it in the bedside drawer. Next to your reading glasses and a packet of medicated plasters and the remote control for a television that’s been off for a week.
He holds it. Doesn’t open it. Not yet.
Because the wallet smells like you. The leather has absorbed thirty years of your body heat, your back pocket, your mornings, and the smell is so specific, so completely you, that opening it would mean moving past the smell and he’s not ready to move past the smell.
And then he opens it. NRIC. ATM card. CHAS card. And the photo.
His mother, laughing, in Cameron Highlands, in 1993, the year before he was born.
And he holds the photo for a long time.
He’s never seen this version of his mother. The young one. The laughing one. The one his father chose to carry for thirty years in a wallet that went everywhere he went, pressed against his body, folded into his life, carried until the carrying stopped.
He puts the photo back. Closes the wallet. Puts it in his own back pocket.
The leather is still warm.
A wallet is the smallest autobiography a person writes. The cards are the chapters, the photos are the confessions. Every item removed is a goodbye and every item kept is a promise.
You’re carrying yours right now. In your pocket or your bag or on the table next to your phone.
Open it. Look at what’s inside. The cards will tell you what you do. But the thing tucked behind the cards, the photo, the note, the receipt you kept for no reason, that will tell you who you are.
And one day, someone will hold your wallet the way the son held his father’s. They’ll smell the leather. They’ll find the photo. And they’ll carry it forward.
Not because they need to. Because the wallet is the last version of you that still fits in a pocket. And pockets are where we keep the things we’re not ready to let go of.
What’s in yours?
3am Stories. Pass it on.
To read thrilling and bone chilling ghost stories visit : https://asiaghosts.com/
To read ghost stories related to houses/HDB: https://asiaghosts.com/house/
To read ghost stories related to school: https://asiaghosts.com/schools/
To read stories related to strange incidents : https://asiaghosts.com/strange-incidents/
To read latest stories around the world : https://sgfollowsall.com/
To read latest viral Singapore stories around the world : https://sgfollowsall.com/singapore-news/
To read latest viral Asia stories around the world : https://sgfollowsall.com/asia-news/
To read primary school compositions: https://sgessays.com/primary-school-compositions
To read secondary school essays: https://sgessays.com/singapore-secondary-school-essays
To read general papers essays: https://sgessays.com/general-paper-essays
To read tips on improving compositions/essays : https://sgessays.com/tips-to-improve-esssays-compositions
To read sample of letters,emails and reports (Situational Writing) – https://sgessays.com/situational-writing-letters-emails-and-reports
To read tips on oral examinations: https://sgessays.com/psle-english-oral-examinations
To practice listening comprehensions : https://sgessays.com/listening-comprehension
To read on interesting Singapore Teacher’s stories / Forum : https://sgessays.com/singapore-teachers-storiesforum
To read free compositions and essays: https://sgessays.com/
To read about how to make money : https://powerwithmoney.com
