The VW Bug I couldn't remember, and the ring I didn't expect to buy.

REXKL had been on my list for six years, ever since I visited Petaling Street with a friend to see the murals and got completely swallowed by the neighbourhood. The heat, the hawker smoke, the sounds of people walking and laughing and talking over each other. I never made it inside REXKL that day. It stayed on the list the way certain places do: quietly, patiently, waiting for the right version of you to show up.

I almost didn't find the entrance. I stood outside longer than I'd like to admit, second-guessing myself, wondering if I had the wrong address. Then I was inside, and the second-guessing shifted into something else, a kind of pleasant confusion. This is because REXKL is not one thing. It's an old building that houses thrift stores, local artisan stalls, a coffee shop, an art exhibition, a food centre, and a bookshop, all existing together with complete confidence that this makes sense. And somehow, it does.

Chinese music played from what I'm fairly certain was a vinyl record, something from the sixties or seventies, all warmth and brass and rhythm I couldn't name the song nor do I understand the lyrics but didn't want to stop hearing it. The smell was old wood and thrift store air: fabric, old china, the particular dustiness of things that have lived in other people's homes. And threaded through all of it, the modern stalls of local designers selling clothes that were sharp and individualistic and entirely of this moment. Old and new, side by side, not competing. Just coexisting.

I told myself to slow down. Do one pass, I said. Get the lay of it. Then go back.

While having my lunch that's when it happened, the thing that surprised me most about the day.

I was sitting enjoying my food, turning over in my mind the stores I saw, when the memory of a yellow or maybe beige VW Bug surfaced. Not from anything I'd seen, exactly, but more from the general atmosphere of the place, all those small, impractical objects that existed purely to provide nostalgia, or to remind you of a memory. We had one when I was a child, and I cannot tell you with certainty what colour it was. The memory is there but the detail has softened. What I could tell you with complete certainty, while having my lunch, was that I needed to find a toy version of it. A small, most certainly impractical VW Bug that I had no use for and absolutely had to have.

I went back in.

I found it. It felt absurd and wonderful like a treasure hunt where the prize was a version of yourself you'd misplaced somewhere in your childhood.

But the day wasn't finished with me yet.

As I was wrapping up, moving through the last few stalls, I stopped at a vendor selling trinkets — rings, pendants, small things arranged carefully on the table. The vendor sat behind her wares in coloured glasses, unhurried, letting people look. And I looked, and found a ring: Victorian-inspired, gothic, black onyx set in silver. I held it and thought, this is not my style. Then I bought it.

I sat with an iced coffee after, waiting for my Grab ride, and kept coming back to the ring on my finger. It wasn't that it had changed how I looked. It was something quieter than that, the realisation that my style and preferences has been changing, slowly, in ways I haven't been keeping track of. That I am different now than I was the last time I checked.

The toy VW Bug sits on my shelf, together with other trinkets from my travels and other collectibles . I look at it and I'm young again, not entirely sure what colour the car was, and not needing to know.

The ring is on my hand as I type this. Still not sure it's my style. Starting to think that might be the point.

REXKL is at 80, Jalan Sultan, Kuala Lumpur. Go without a plan. and be ready to spend your day in fun and nostalgia.