Verklempt

My goal for 2017 was to read 70 books. It wasn't too much of a stretch at the beginning, considering how I read 127 the year before. I managed to read 31 in the first three months, right until I had that bad break-up and lost all the mood for reading.

But just like how I found everything when I had nothing, the tables turned on me. Instead of achieving my initial goal of reading seventy books, I wrote one. An actual manuscript that I took seriously, like my life depended on it.

My life never stopped revolving around buses and trains, even long after the one who first brought me on the North-South Line left. In fact, the love for roads came after the first major break-up in 2014, and the love for everything else came after the second, in 2017. I always have his dust to thank for the other things I come to realise.

It is thanks to this love for public transport that I came up with these thoughts. It is the love I had for a person that I couldn't have that first brought this image to me, way back in 2015.

For the first time in my writing, I am intertwining fact and fiction into a story. There is a collection of memories scattered into this book, interactions and words that only two people in the world will remember. And it makes me so nervous yet at the same time I can't wait for it to reach their hands.

This time last year I was wishing to die, imagining myself drowning or being dragged beneath the wheels of a train. I always couldn't decide between these two, couldn't decide whether death by your biggest fear or by something you love was better.

Now I am terrified of dying before my time. Before I can accomplish my lifelong dream. I've only ever shared the stories of my past with the readers of this blog; about the whole world going against me in 2012, about me wanting to let go of the world in 2016. Now I'm just dying to share my story with it, the story that fate and my mind made up and brought together.

I learned a new word a few days ago: verklempt, when you're too emotional to speak. It couldn't be more perfect to describe my 2017, my manuscript, my mind now. It's safe for me to say, I wrote a book in 2017, and that is all I care about.

Maybe next year I'll be able to say I published a book in 2018, and that is all I care about.

Maybe next year I'll finally be a writer instead of an aspiring one. Let's hope I don't die.