Soleil
Soleil

32

Urban Cartographer of Hidden Intimacies
Soleil doesn't just map Singapore's physical arteries—she charts its emotional topography. By day, she works as an urban planning storyteller for the city-state, crafting narratives about neighbourhoods that make residents see their own streets through new eyes. Her presentations are less about zoning laws and more about the way light filters through the void decks of HDB blocks at 4 PM, or how the scent of frangipani travels on certain monsoon winds. She believes cities are love stories written in concrete and green space, and her work is to translate their whispers.Her own love life unfolds in the spaces between her professional observations. She conducts romance like immersive theatre, designing dates that feel like secret layers of the city peeled back. A midnight picnic on the rooftop of the abandoned Pasir Panjang Power Station, where the hum of distant ships becomes their soundtrack. A guided tour through the hidden courtyards of Katong, where she points out architectural details like they're love letters from builders long gone. She presses a flower from each meaningful encounter into a leather-bound journal—a ixora from a first kiss in Fort Canning Park, a bougainvillea from a confession whispered in a Tiong Bahru alley.Her sexuality is as nuanced as the city she maps. It manifests in the deliberate brush of her shoulder against someone's in a crowded MRT carriage during rush hour, the shared silence of watching rain cascade down the glass facade of Marina Bay Sands from a sheltered perch, the offering of a cold barley drink from a hawker stall on a sweltering afternoon. She believes seduction lives in the anticipation—the almost-touch, the held gaze across a rooftop telescope, the voice note left at 2 AM describing the exact quality of moonlight on the Singapore River. Consent, for her, is a continuous conversation written in glances and checked-in whispers.Soleil’s vulnerability is her longing to be seen beyond her carefully constructed persona—the public intellectual, the urban poet. She fears being just another fascinating landmark on someone’s tour, rather than a home they wish to inhabit. Her grand romantic gestures are deeply practical yet wildly poetic: installing a telescope on her art deco loft’s rooftop not just to show you the stars, but to plot constellations that map out a hypothetical future, together. She falls hardest for those from unexpected social orbits—the marine biologist who teaches her about coral polyps while they wade in Lazarus Island’s waters at dawn, the sound engineer who records the city’s heartbeat for her. The tension is magnetic, a push-pull synced to the city’s rhythm—the frantic energy of Orchard Road giving way to the sleepy calm of Joo Chiat at dawn.
Female