NS16

Three tracks for three parties, but it was never determined who the middle one belonged to. Possibly me, with the way I first came in between five years ago. Or possibly the hurricane, since the rose owns the tracks going Marina South Pier while the flame, Jurong East. Right?

He sat in the middle during the movie as well, passing my cookies to and fro. The rose bit on one and immediately regretted, with his hate for raisins. After the film we both leaned over and started talking across his lap. Despite being the middleman he must have felt so left out sometimes.

Our friendship always revolved around the most basic things, never anything great. You wouldn't catch us up on the high stools at bars, drinking our time away. Instead we'd sit facing the windows at a Subway, staring at the strangers leaving the hub. We'd go from talking about universes and afterlife to laughing about the stupidest memes.

Unknowingly, we always took turns being in the middle. There was never any friendship I wanted other than the both of them, where I was blessed with two kinds of best friends. The kind I would marry and the kind I would always easily talk about everything with.

But that was our last date as a trio, because barely a week later we all fell apart. One side of the triangle was knocked out, sending our entire formation crumbling down.

This train service will end at Ang Mo Kio. Sometimes the announcement goes, terminating the train at the middle platform. It never crossed my mind that that train service was our friendship.

NS17/CC15

The earliest memory with you, just the two of us, was back in early 2014 when I was figuring out ways to school from my Pasir Ris house. I hopped on the first bus that came along and took it right to the end, without a care for being late.

Before that there was always a third party: a hurricane, because you were the only mid-point from Woodlands and Paya Lebar, where I was staying at the time. We used to sit outside the gantries with our pizza bars, nestled between the other lost souls.

We always separated the moment we tapped in again, me towards the Circle Line and him, the North-South. My grandmother doesn't understand the concept of all these lines, so despite you being only fifteen minutes from her place, she always said Buat apa pergi jauh-jauh?! She doesn't realise that I've heard Change at this station for the Circle Line more often than for the North-South Line, because I am always on the latter.

Somehow, you became the first place I always end up, whenever I didn't know what else to do and where to go. Four years ago you were my routine, during the time I was getting over him. There were other shorter routes but I stubbornly loved going the long way, and that was through you.

A year ago it was the same, running away from him and to you. I found comfort in you, with my diary and a cup of iced chocolate even long after he left again. My grandma was right, you are so far away but I never get sick of that one-hour long ride, even with the same views over and over.

It's a whole other world with you, the moment we pass the park on your outskirts. It almost feels like home, even if I've never stayed here or have any relatives here, even with the crowds changing lines and forming queues for the trains during rush hour. Bishan, where I feel at home despite the sea of strangers.

NS18

If this is happening in the past, we won't be nobodies. We'd have the attention of everyone, alright. Staring and pointing fingers like we are an exhibit. We'd be animals, hopelessly staring out the glass of our cages.

We won't know what to do. Maybe we'd just be kids who somehow fell through the screen doors. Everyone's usual lifeless eyes would open wide, and maybe there'd be a collective gasp. What are those two boys doing in there, they'd panic.

The presence of people on the other side of the glass doors can only mean one thing. That it's happening in the past, in an alternate reality where the world is still fine, that a train is definitely coming. 

No one will be reaching out to us, or even frantic enough to seek authority. We used to complain about the trains being late, the screens stating 4 minutes or even 6. But we'd do anything to slow the next one down this time, a beast made of six carriages. 

I'd gather just enough balls to turn and stare once the headlights find my face. There's a last minute guess to what the last thing I see would be: the tracks, the stunned expressions, or the dusty sign that says NS18 Braddell. It so turned out neither, but the train's wide smile as it robs us of our lives.

NS19

For as long as I've lived, I've only ever seen him work at this place. Decades, it seems. At the edge of the bank he will always stand, in his police uniform and greying hair. A baton pokes out one of his holsters, though I find it hard to imagine him using it. That's funny since a huge part of my life revolves around him beating the shit out of me with a belt or hanger.

This is an old story but I was away from my family for the whole of 2013, so I missed a year with him. Both our egos acted as walls, until heartbreak from a third party finally knocked them down. I returned in early 2014, and it was just too easy falling back once the awkward hugs and tears were over and done with.

His colleagues orders bottles of cookies from my mother every Chinese New Year, so we grew to have this annual thing where she, my little brother and I would lug bags over. If not, I doubt we'd come anywhere near here as a family.

You can gauge from that how loose my tie with this station is. Yet somehow I will always remember my way around because it's that familiar. From the bookstore above the bus interchange to the lift standing out at the side of the atrium, nothing much has changed. The bright canary walls remain and the entire vicinity still thrives.

But we changed. I went from a bespectacled fifteen-year-old girl who kept looking down to an adult standing tall and straight. He went from handing my mother a fifty-dollar note to buy my little brother and I dinner, to having his money rejected for his lunch to be on me. 

We went from just a teenager and her strict old man to a daughter and father. Now I talk about the book I'm writing when I always tried so hard to keep my passion for writing from him. Now he talks about our family's problems, when he used to lie all the time to keep up his steel facade. 

Despite being one of the first stations to be completed, this is one I very seldom pass by. But just like a father I missed a year with, its winding ways and atmosphere will always feel like home even if we don't always lean against each other. I guess Toa Payoh is just like my father; the oldest station still standing and my oldest man still thriving.

NS20

This wasn't a part of my routine at any point of my life yet it unknowingly grew on me. (Or, I grew on it.)

I wanted to tell just one story about this station and then I remembered another, until ultimately I realised there's an abundance of tales. Some of which aren't mine, some of which may or may not be true, some of which aren't even in my lifetime or the universe I am living in.

There's a mix of everything here, from a history of Jewish cemeteries to devotion sessions at nearby Catholic churches. Its very name was derived from the latter; Novem, the Latin word for nine, symbolising the prayers said for nine consecutive days.

Ghost stories, involving coffins and phantom trains. Some even claim seeing headless apparitions especially during the last hour of service, because who in their right mind would haunt in broad daylight and peak hours, right?

But you know me. I'm a very personal soul, so the stories that hang heaviest are my own ghosts. Unresting pasts, unexplained dreams, unfulfilled promises.

I know a boy who had to make this place home, along with its crowds and shoving commuters. He didn't want to become one of them with their lifeless eyes and impatience. So he stopped taking the train, escaping getting swept with the floods.

I know another boy who had to make this place home, the smell of the hospital and the heights of the twin towers. Their collision was at its peak, and the thought of his ex best friend being just next door irked him. So he stopped working there, and is now about to soar even higher than the towers of New Phoenix Park.

I know two other boys who had to make this place home, living on the remnants of the dead. Their masks were their only protection, music and each other their only company. It took them a month to realise the stillness of the world outside the station's walls. So they kicked a door open and jumped down, their torchlights accentuating the train tracks.

Even with stories that aren't mine to tell, it's evident that Novena is home. A shelter, a safehouse, even when these boys didn't want it by choice. They managed to leave, but its platforms and crowds continue to thrive.

NS21/DT11

Thirty years ago you were structured, years before I was born. At only twelve meters deep, you are the shallowest of all underground stations. I never noticed even through any telltale sign, like short escalators and ceilings that don't rise.

The last time I saw you, the posters for an insurance company plastered your walls all over; everywhere I looked. Enough for me to associate you with that white outline against a red background. But I don't have the right to say that, as if I see you everyday, because it was only that once. I'm pretty sure the posters have changed ten times since then. Or have they?

People have commented on your flaws, like having to tap out to change lines. Your red and blue aren't connected, making the people who use you exit and enter through two different doors. But I love you all the same, letting myself go with the flow of all these strangers. 

They don't notice the illustration on your wall, an intertwine of past and future. Singapore in the year 2200, inspired by both your history and what will come next and next and next. 

Mention you and most people will think of your circus. You used to be one, until they scrapped it off your name. But what irony, because you keep ending. Your walls, your depth, your posters. Don't you? You used to be Newton Circus, but now you're just Newton. Maybe the art on your wall that keeps getting ignored will come true someday.

NS22

So it's a date, then.

No, wait, not a date. Just a meeting.

He said both sentences in less than ten seconds, as if reflecting the indecisiveness of his feelings for me. At one point a hurricane, at another nothing more than a sudden released breath.

This was late 2014, when I was only just discovering the world with me in it. When I finally figured out that he was the wind and sky and birds. 

I almost didn't recognise him because he looked so much lighter, in his face and weight. It was about five months since we last met and talked. Maybe I was lighter too, so I was able to look at him in a different perspective. It was so much easier to forgive back then.

He had on a light blue t-shirt and I was in grey, no cardigan. I'd described it as going back home to Pasir Ris after a year: the familiar outline mixed with something new. I didn't follow my instinct to run as fast as I could when he said You just can't easily forget someone you were with for so long.

The main objective of meeting was to follow him collect his pay, but that was exactly what we did not do. Instead we had Pezzo and took a weird elevator with only two buttons: the fourth and fifty-fifth storeys. Why is it so dark?! he exclaimed, but I could barely hear him with the air pressure kicking in. 

We both hadn't been there before, and I remember wishing there were other things we were both experiencing for the first time together. But there weren't. 

There were poems about clouds and wherever you looked there were just sky and skyscrapers. If only it wasn't an air-conditioned place but open, with natural wind. It would have made it perfect, with the hurricane running shy beside me. 

He only held my hand when we walked through the bookstore and never once did we kiss. And that alone made the entire day flawless for me. I wish it'd stayed that way.

Orchard, where we messed up our first few dates very early 2013. Where we fell back together almost two years later to mess up everything else. 

NS23

Late 2013: his school, in the middle of the red line. She came from hers on the green and they took the train to town together.

This was when feelings were none, be it for each other or for trains. Just two friends who happened to have a lot to talk and argue about. Two people who almost tore friendships and relationships apart.

It began to rain when they reached their destination, just about to cross the junction by the H&M building.

I have an umbrella!, he exclaimed, digging through his backpack while the drizzle fell on them. It took a while before he finally came up with an umbrella cover, announcing that he didn't bring the umbrella itself.

She still remembers the look on his face when he stretched the cover over his head, that fang poking out at the corner of his lips. They ended up running the moment the traffic turned green for them, raindrops soaking her pink cardigan and his moss t-shirt.

What was it they were looking for? Shoes. He needed a new pair of shoes, even though he had no money, saying he would come back if he saw something he really liked. They made their rounds along town, him taking every pair into consideration.

Late 2017: his vocation, in the middle of the red line. She came from home on the green, and they took the train to town together.

This was when feelings were gone, after spending weeks at their peak. Just two friends who almost. Two people who tore friendships and relationships apart.

It didn't rain when they reached their destination; in fact, they realised they alighted at the wrong station and ended up walking to the next.

Again, they were looking for shoes but not for him this time. He wanted to get her a belated birthday present, never forgetting the ones she bought him four years before. They made their rounds once again, her turn being picky with every pair of shoes.

You know if you get someone shoes as a gift, that person will walk out of your life, she was telling him, because she was abundant in superstitions like these. Since then they kept trying to run but to no avail.

Somerset, where they spent hours scouring for the perfect pair of shoes, only to get one somewhere else. She paid for his when feelings were none while he paid for hers when feelings were gone. And while his long broke, hers are still new, the gloss brighter than the futures they dared imagine.

Next station: NS22

NS24/NE6/CC1

You stand out because you are the only station with three lines. But maybe not everyone favours this number, since a third party will always symbolise treachery.

The rose and I were supposed to fetch the wind from Outram Park but we were late, having spent the day at the abandoned tracks and the bridge overlooking everything that usually swallowed us. We rushed to Dhoby Ghaut instead, where he was waiting and already starting to sulk. We were running late but he was thirsty, so he stopped me for a Boost. 

Remember how the smallest things stick and the most insignificant mean a lot to me? Somehow I knocked over my smoothie and it flipped on the counter. The way he reacted still burns in my mind, and it almost reminded me of when he caught me whenever I fell.

He asked if he could try mine, and took a sip right out my straw. In front of his best friend, he wouldn't dare, pretending to be grossed out at the thought of sharing something with me. It's funny, the way he kept trying to hide.

I remember the conversations we had walking to Cathay, where his best friend was waiting. She says you're pretty and you deserve better, he casually said. 

I picked the movie adaptation of a book I was just telling him about: The Girl With All The Gifts. Thinking about it now, it wasn't really his kind of movie and it was his birthday but he let me pick. Sometimes he degrades me with mean words but once in a while I catch a glimpse of his own willing kindness. 

His twentieth birthday will somehow always be my favourite memory of him. Not anything from before, when feelings were none; not anything from after, when feelings were peaked. It was the underlying compassion and all that we'd gone through with or without each other.

Where he hid his face by my shoulder when somebody on the screen was about to get killed. Where I hooked my arm through his as we walked; where I slid around on my sneakers and he asked how old are you already. Where I went on about what really happened in the book that the film didn't include and he had all his attention on me. 

We separated at the station, where he went home on his red line. His best friend was going back to his aunt's place at Eunos, so the two of us went on the Circle Line together. 

Dhoby Ghaut, the only station with three lines. Where I realised that I was the girl with all the gifts she could ask for: an other half and a best friend who meant everything.

Next station: NS23

NS25/EW13

I have no idea what his name is. But he has daughters, and was asking me what Teacher's Day gifts he could get for their teachers.

He had a fist on my stomach and I felt a little embarrassed at the way it vibrated at his touch. It was my first time but it wasn't even painful, just a little ticklish. What is the meaning behind this, he was asking, and I started wishing I spoke as easily as I wrote. 

But even if I told him everything he wouldn't understand my grief; he had two breathing versions of what I lost. While he was etching into my skin the date that she left, I wondered if he had tattoos symbolising his own daughters. If he did, they were probably their initials or birth dates, which was still a whole existence more than mine.

I came back a year later but he wasn't there. Another young lad tattooed my semi-colon, and he took a picture of it to post on their Facebook page. But it didn't mean anything because he kept silent the whole time, never asking me what this tattoo meant to me. 

Last April I returned, with a brilliant idea and a poly friend's rough sketch. My first tattooist was there, and we spent some time coming up with the final draft. I told him I wanted a triangle made of flames and roses and feathers, symbolising the friendship between the two most significant boys of my life and I.

The feathers were the hardest to render, until he eventually suggested making it a whole one instead. It fed me another brilliant symbol: that my hurricane was always made of just one chunk, unlike my rose and I who were made of different bits and pieces. My tattooist made some changes in the drawing on his computer until there it was: our love triangle, laid out before me.

This last tattoo was the most painful for me, physically and probably emotionally. I know it's painful babe, just tahan, he kept reassuring. It only reminded me of the voices at the hospital, telling me it would be alright when I was nearly screaming. I tried my hardest not to flinch even a little after that.

Again, he asked me what it meant and I told him the significance of each side. But I never got to elaborate; once again, I wished I spoke as well as I wrote.

I boarded the train at City Hall again three hours after I entered, with an aching shoulder and a broken heart. It wasn't even the start of this tattoo come to life.

Next station: NS24/NE6/CC1

NS26/EW14

Once upon a time I hated birthdays with a vengeance, almost for no reason at all. Those people are just black voids to me now, blank and meaningless. But there was one girl I still think of from time to time: I lost her several times, but thinking back, she was the one there for me nearly every birthday.

She was an artist, making art on canvases and the foam on coffee cups. Maybe she still is; I haven't heard from her in two years, being one of those girls who left in their train without me. She probably still thinks I was just being disloyal, which is fine with me. It was my fault for never telling her anything. 

Just like how a tiny rose watched the hurricane grow, she was there from my immature thirteen-year-old self to the pre-depression in 2015. It was just too bad that she never stayed longer, that I never held her back with me the way I always did. 

She got me iced chocolate on my nineteenth birthday, took a picture of me in my tight red dress. We were surrounded by strangers, office workers making their way down the escalators, where they tapped in and continued wasting their life away in the peak hour crowds.

We didn't take a picture together, but I remember what she was wearing. A flannel from Uniqlo; a few days later I got the same shirt, after she picked out the one in red for me. But come to think of it, why didn't I stay longer with her?

She held my arm as we swayed through the crowds, the way she did in secondary school. Her mother always called me her bodyguard because I was one head taller than her. We separated at the platform, as she made her way home while I went to Serangoon to meet my mother.

Raffles Place remained her workplace for the next... I can't even say because I'm not sure. We stopped talking. I guess it just became the last time and place she ever held my hand. 

Next station: NS25/EW13

NS27/CE2

Five years ago there were seven against the world.

Girls, a mix of artist and dancer and academic. One of them stood out for all the wrong reasons, with the accidents she spilled, be it the muffin she spat out from laughing too hard or the horrors she faced alone the year before.

None of them wanted to know. But they were playing a game where they passed a corn cob around in their circle, pretending it was a microphone and taking turns to update each other about their lives. She just had to tell them the one thing that made them squirm on the insides. She told them about Black.

They didn't want to know. You could see it clear on their faces, but the one girl who confessed didn't notice. She just wanted to let them know the biggest change in her life. Not school, or her boyfriend of eleven months, but the boy who was using her when she was down.

That girl regrets it now, looking at that very scene more than four years later. How could she be so blind? No wonder they aren't here anymore; they all took the same train and left, telling each other that she missed it on purpose and will not be thought of anymore.

Eight months ago there were four.

They weren't against the world, with no floods to make them huddle the way fire ants do. They weren't against each other either, despite the differences in their kinds of depth. One girl still stood out though, with the long scar down her left arm.

But their peace was made yet threatened with rounds of Uno, the grease from their pizzas making the corners of the cards oily. Just the day before they already spent twelve hours together, facing the same threats: unreasonable customers and mountains of stocks. The day afterward they did the same, keeping their picnic secret from the others who slaved away in their absences.

They took pictures against the sunset, with arms around each other's shoulders and waists.

Since then, two of these girls have resigned, finding other full-time jobs outside their safe little bubble.

The girl who stood out wanted to love those girls forever, but despite taking the same train, they still alighted at different stations. That was when she realised they will separate the same way she did with the six girls from years before. Who knew that their own differences came to be the flood that she thought missed them?

Six months ago there were two.

A boy and a girl, pasts so different and futures both bleak.

They stood beside each other for four years but never touched. The world could only end if they ever did. He meant everything to her but was about to wonder for the rest of her life if she ever did to him.

He carried her in the rain that afternoon, lifting her up so swiftly and walking with her in his arms. Nobody could stop them but themselves, and it was the hardest lesson she would ever learn: that the weakest thing like a vine came to be the tightest boundary to pull them apart.

For these two, the flood hit them hard and she tried to hold them both above the water until she realised he wasn't even affected by it. She Let him go, and he swam so smoothly because he never needed her.

Marina Bay. Where the seven girls danced in the darkness; where the four girls hugged in the setting sun; where the boy and the girl loved in the rain.

Next station: NS26/EW14

NS28

May; he was an aspiring pilot. I mean, he still is, but he's too far gone for me to refer to him as someone still here. I met him four years ago after a break-up; he was my friend's friend's friend. Well, it was technically the peak of my social life so I had a lot of that thing called 'friend'.

He isn't important, and neither is my story with him. But he still gets the credit for bringing me somewhere I haven't been.

The station itself was so devoid of movement that even the security guard was falling asleep. I told the aspiring pilot I had to pee, and I still remember the way he said: Are you kidding me? I also remember wearing my blue jeans, dark t-shirt tucked haphazardly into them and the navy sneakers the hurricane bought me a year before.

We went up the stairs to the pier, the sun taking its time descending. He said it was too bad for me, considering how the sky was purple and pink when he came alone a few months before.

The wind never once stopped disturbing us, ruffling his short hair and my locks. My hair was still long and I remember the way some strands flew into his mouth when the wind picked up. There was nothing special about him to me, just an air of mystery that I didn't want to solve.

Eventually he sat me down and told his life story, since he already knew bits of mine. Family, academia, rebellion. For three hours I didn't get to talk and just listened to him instead. What a rare occurrence, huh?

But he taught me something that still hangs somewhere in my head, like a neglected sticky note that will always be there, waiting for you to notice it and remember it again: that I was meant to float.

I know it sounds silly. But he was a pilot, dreaming of living in the clouds someday. It wasn't strange coming from him, and was the reason I refused to make up with my hurricane so quickly after he returned. He showed me that staying in one place won't do; keep moving, keep typing, keep floating. Don't make anywhere or anyone home.

That was the first and last time I ever went to Marina South Pier.

Next station: NS27/CE2

Selfish

How is it that strength is measured in the amount you manage to lift? It's weights for the boys and heartbreaks for the girls. You keep testing the physical and emotional pain you can endure, just so you can be admired for how much you withstand.

When I think about it, the heart is so fragile compared to everything else. How is it possible for it to be the strongest organ in our body? Yet the moment I am writing this, I lean against my desk but my heart pushes me away from it each time it beats.

The heartbeat is so strong that it'll reverberate through another person if he leans against you. Keep still, the both of you, and eventually no one can tell which beats are whose.

My heart has gone through most of it: excitement when my favourite cartoon came on. Anxiety when I had to give a speech in front of the class. Ache when the stupid boy I liked changed his Facebook status to 'In A Relationship'. Euphoria when the swing I was sitting on went ninety degrees from the ground. Fear when I woke up in the middle of the night with a force on my chest.

I've had my fair share of weight, nothing special enough for people to think greatly of me. Maybe from the outside looking in, the heat is barely felt because I'm the only one getting eaten by the fire. All they see are the fading scars, never the blood pouring out.

Despite everything, I think my heart still hasn't had enough. You know how some people are so adventurous for some reason, always with the need to travel and climb mountains, jump from cliffs and shit? I believe my heart is one of those people, always looking for 'fun' where they could possibly die.

We're both at our highest, waiting to be pushed off all over again. Or our lowest, if you're looking at us from another direction. I once read a story where an anchor dropped from the sky and a sailor descended, as if the sea was beyond the clouds. Since then I never really figured out the difference between peak and trough.

I'm sure everyone has heard about that Japanese method of fixing broken pottery with gold. I thought it was beautiful at first, until I realised the absurdity of it. I don't want my heart to be attractive, for people to seek shelter in it. Let it be drowned, charred, broken. Anything but beautiful.

Bleed red. Stay in a burning house until the flames turn you black. Swim in the deepest recess of the sea until you turn blue. I have put you through everything, but it is dipping you in gold that is the hardest. God forbid you ever become a heart of gold, filled with kindness and generosity. We don't have much left for ourselves.

Pregnant

If you had a chance to meet anyone, dead or alive, who would you pick and why? This question was always asked in my English classes, being composition prompts or journal topics. I never had a good answer, probably just naming some celebrity to thank her for the songs she put out.

After some thinking on the bus this morning and all my twenty-two years of living, I've found my answer. I want to meet my mother when she was pregnant with me. 

I want to know what she went through with me forming in her. What pantangs she disobeyed, thinking it wouldn't affect anything. When she was pregnant with my elder brother, she refused to eat rice, saying the smell made her nauseous. He grew up with some kind of condition where he's almost phobic of rice.

With all the differences between my brothers and I, I wonder what she consumed when she had me. Alcohol, cigarettes? Sometimes I convince myself she must have taken some drugs, for me to have grown up this way, unable to look at anything without exaggerating its ordinariness.

Was she tender with all forms of life, thus my care for snails and insects of all things? Did she walk straight all the time like a wild boar, thus my obsession with lines? Did she go swimming when she was a few weeks pregnant and nearly drowned, thus my wariness of water?

I can't help but wonder if she had some kind of depression having me. I know she was angsty with my elder brother, which probably explains his anger management issues. But what kind of thoughts did she have with me? Did it ever cross her mind to kill herself along with me? 

I want to meet my mother when she was forming me, because I wonder what she had to be like for me to be this way. Or what she had to go through with this eccentric life banging against the walls of her womb. I'd like to know if it was her pregnancy habits that made me like this, or my already existing flame that burned her from the inside, causing any of her high or depression or anger.

Red

There's only one artist I'd immediately recall when thinking of the colour red. In fact, that's pretty odd in itself, the act of pondering about a colour. Who does that? Colours have always been there, just the same as the air we breathe and the numbers we count.

But this girl made me associate her with red, especially more than five years after her best-selling album in 2012. She just released her sixth last November, where she constantly used the word 'golden' in her lyrics instead. It's like your body is gold; Deep blue, but you painted me golden; Made your mark on me, a golden tattoo.

Five years back during interviews, she was constantly talking about the relationships she had and the chaos that came with them. She talked about the colour red symbolising not only the roses and passion, but also the anger and bleeding hearts and fire. She said that a love is only right and real when it is not red, but golden.

I don't want to be that girl daydreaming about 'love' anymore, much like how this girl has grown out of her country songs revolving around fairytales. You found me and you're no longer a daydream, no longer the "you'll find someone better" that everyone was telling me about before I met you.

Five years ago today you became mine. You brought me out of my misery, out of my shell but most of all, out of the east. You're right, I will always blame you for everything that happened in 2015. For leaving in 2014. But I will also thank you for showing me the first half of the red line.

With all the passion and anger and betrayal that came with the red, you brought me the North-South Line as well. I grew to love Woodlands especially, even after you first left me. I took 168 for the first time, falling in love with the expressways.

Orchard and Somerset, where we had our first few dates. Your ITE and camp days, when I frequented Choa Chu Kang just to fetch you, then Novena when you worked part-time at Mount Elizabeth. I loved Woodlands the most, where I would send you off to 950, where we would sit beneath the tracks with our drinks and takoyaki and talk about everyone walking against us.

It wasn't all sweet, of course. Jurong East was where you dumped me for the first time, shoving me off your arm and walking away. Bishan, becoming the place I'd go to just to get away from you. Dhoby Ghaut, where I stormed off in anger after yelling Fuck you! in front of everyone. Marsiling, where you stumbled around the blocks, calling me thirteen times with no answer.

Back in 2012, I called the boy who broke my heart Red. I wish I hadn't, because he isn't worthy of it. He is an empty face to me now, a meaningless void that spat me back out when 2013 and you came along. I know it's stupid for me to revolve you and this relationship around an MRT line, but I have both of you to thank for everything.

Without you, there wouldn't be red and without red, there wouldn't be you. I love you, and I love the North-South Line. How I wish the both of you could intertwine forever, but now you're in Pasir Ris with me, caught at the furthest end of the green line instead.

Disgrace

Regret is always heavy, especially knowing you had the power to say or do something different. Something that could have changed your day, or someone's perspective of you, or your entire life. Today I'm heavy with my silence, knowing I had the authority to step in; only I didn't.

Working in retail for nearly three years, I've gotten the natural instinct to look up when someone says 'eh, excuse me' no matter how far or rudely it's called. This man's voice was so loud that I couldn't possibly ignore it; I thought it was a customer who needed my help.

But he wasn't calling me. It was a man standing by the Malay books shelves, his huge e-scooter thing parked next to him.

He started yelling at these two ladies, a pair I had served earlier when they asked me about calligraphy ink. The younger woman was noticeably timid, her voice and gaze low but never forgetting her gratitude. "Thank you so much," she shyly said earlier, still four words more than what most customers would say. She had an accent that I didn't recognise, very unlike my Malaysian colleagues with their Cantonese or the ones from China.

"Eh excuse me, you never see that you hit me is it?!" the man was yelling at them, the younger woman with a basket chocked full of supplies. She turned back to look at him, obviously shocked and confused.

"I never hit you." she said, loud enough for me to hear.

"What never hit? My thing drop what, what never hit?" he snapped back, referring to his stupid e-scooter thing that I always thought make their riders look ridiculous.

"I never hit, the thing drop itself." she answered, visibly confused. Her voice was still calm compared to his.

"What by itself?! This thing so heavy how to drop by itself!?"

And by then I was gone from their radius, instead walking in the cashier counter towards my Stationery supervisor. Even then I could hear his voice, repeating again and again: "Eh, this thing expensive you know! If break who going to pay!? You got money pay or not, huh!?"

None of my colleagues heard it because they all had their attention on their own customers. I was so busy concentrating on this argument in the distance that their voices still ring clear in my head, even til now.

I just continued helping my Stationery supervisor, packing the scanned items into bags while she made transactions. By the time I looked up again, I found that the next customer making payment was the pair of ladies I'd served earlier. I smiled and took the basket from her, and that was when our interaction was interrupted with the man's raging voice, already on his way out yet still tormenting this woman.

"Eh next time you walk you see in front! Bloody idiot. Eh this thing expensive you know, if break who going to pay?! You got no money pay one lah!" he keeps repeating it, oh my God oh my God, stop. And then he says something new: "Fucking idiot! Fuck you lah!"

And that was when I looked at him and saw how ugly he was and I wanted to do something when the younger woman's voice broke me out of my trance: "Do you have the camera here?" The way she said camera was unusual, like kah-may-rah, her voice still stubbornly calm and low. "This man keep saying I knock his scooter."

In the background all I heard was, "Eh fucking idiot! Next time you see in front of you when you walk, stupid bloody fucker!" and he turned to the person he was with and said, "Eh... benda ni mahal, dah pecah nanti dia ada duit bayar ke!?"

And all I did was snap at him Eh enough lah!, maybe the rudest I could have been to a customer, only for him to keep going on and on with his complaints and profanities and how expensive his stupid e-scooter is. And I wanted to spit on him, a man of my own fucking race.

My stationery supervisor was next to me, confused and only able to continue scanning the items in the woman's basket. It was only after the queue was cleared did I manage to tell them what I knew.

And I wish I'd said or done something differently for her and against him. I wish I'd intervened and told him to stop the moment it started, or shouted at him to get out of the store before I call authority, or just said to him not to tarnish our race's image. Anything at all. Anything but shut it out like a fucking coward.

I thought the man was a disgrace to our Malay society, but I guess that honour belongs to me. For not speaking up. For not helping her. For not doing things differently. For not intervening when I was the one in the store who had the power to. This will always be one of the things I will always think about, wishing I'd done something. It riles me up.

Years

2012 // 2013 // 2014 // 2015 // 2016 // 2017

The girl from my past who always cared
About the mocking laughs or being stared
Eyes glued to the floor and dragging feet
Cheap sneakers rubbing against concrete

The girl from my past with one eye hidden
Her friends moved forward but she didn't
Photos of their graduation put up on walls
She barely escaped the loop of school halls

The girl from my past recovering from him
Her metaphors filling her head to the brim
Discovering the world in roads and tracks
Came to be her last time above the cracks

The girl from my past with a second heart
Days at a hospital almost tearing her apart
The brightness of her sun fading over time
Robbing her own life, the next perfect crime

The girl from my past drowning in regret
Her second soul will remain an unpaid debt
Strained eyes against her world's darkness
Her worthless body in her fragile harness

The girl from my past burning her flower
Who found and picked her from her cower
The tornado not only carried her but threw
Over the lion city and life's unusual view

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.

Mine

Blank pages are my comfort. Not alcohol. Not cigarettes. Not you. They are an opening, like a river mouth. They open me up like a knife slicing through your skin. Slitting through my neck, you can say.

When I was into reading, you didn't let me go into the library or bookstore for too long. Sometimes not even at all. And I don't like the way you kept telling me not to walk in the sun. You'd pull me in beneath the shelter, despite knowing how much I love the heat. Your way of protection is by restricting me even from the things I love.

You almost stopped me from writing this novel. "I don't want to read your book," you said. Just a simple sentence that will haunt me forever. It's fine if you don't want to; but I nearly stopped myself from writing it just to make sure you won't get upset about it. I don't blame you for it, because I'm using my past to write a story. My mistake was being sorry to you.

There's this couple from my secondary school, I told you about them. The girl with striking hazel eyes and the boy who broke my specs when he threw a paper ball or a bottle cap, can't remember, hard at me. Everytime I look at them my heart slumps, thinking about how they've been together for so long. Meanwhile our date was always supposed to be the 11th of January; but you left so many times in these five years that I don't have the right to call it ours anymore.

I'll forever be the girl who kept getting back with her ex. I can't be that woah, they're still together? couple with you and it's a tiny insignificant thing, I know. But everytime I think about it I start having doubts about you. It's not easy to trust someone who so easily dumped you so many times before. You told me not to think of the past, but if I do that I won't have my own land to stand on. 

Months ago I kept telling myself you'd leave for the tenth time if I let you in again. "I just don't love you anymore", "What if I like someone else and that someone likes me back?", "I just want to experience dating at this age". But this time the words were I just want to be single; and they weren't yours, but mine. 

When we first visited Admiralty Park, we went round back and went down this steep slope. In the past I'd whine about it and persuade you to walk the other way; this time, you held out your hand but I didn't hold it and descended just fine. It's such a tiny detail that serves as reminder for my strength now. You're finally treating me right, but you're too late... I'm treating me right.

When you asked me if I had someone in mind, you were right. But it isn't who you think. It's me. I want to chase this one real thing I've known a decade before I even met you. You already took my daughter from me; don't take my passion. Don't take me away from me. Don't pull me to the shelter from the sun, don't get angry at me when I write poems that aren't about you, don't pull me by the face and force me to kiss you. 

Maybe I'm the hurricane, but it took me a while to realise and leave the mess I made. I thought we had a future together. But that was what I thought eight months ago before you left me. I don't trust you anymore and I don't want to make the mistake of leaning on and relying on you wholly. I said it upfront that I just want to be single, and you called it an excuse. This blog post will be my excuse, then. If I'm still your fire, then okay, but you don't see two suns, don't you?