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?