The worlds I live in

Every time I start on Amanda Lee Koe's award-winning work I'm struck by the locality of the writing. It's a love letter to an experience that's too close to home. It's almost like it should be illegal. That a voice that beautiful could be written for me. 

This is what it means doesn't it, to have a cultural voice. And if I'm so unused to it, so moved by the fact that the person writing the stories is like me, for me. For people like me then maybe there's something a little wrong and fucked up about the way I am. 

The way we all are. We. 

Or is it really because she writes about Ang Mo Kio and Bishan parks, and that Sledge lives in Clementi like Jess did, or more so because that particular story, the intersection between small-town America and our gleaming asian metropolis is something an even smaller subsection of people would understand. 

Maybe I should write more again. But this time, I'll write about me. that's what I need to do. I seem to have replaced my angst about a girl and another for a longing for belonging and home. Maybe that's what its been all along hasn't it? 

It's universal and local, and it's not sung about enough. Loneliness is very much the flavor of 2021, not love. 

It seems I just have to get back into the habit of writing. Alas. I've let myself slip. Lazy. No. 

I've just been running. I've been afraid, I've been trying to forget instead of facing up to the things in my past because staring them in the face hasn't been getting anywhere. It's time for things to change. It's time for me to write again. 

And I'll make sure I write each sentence more bloody beautifully than the last. I'm not in a rush, it doesn't matter how much longer it takes, but I've worked on me enough. You don't have to be a perfect person to be an artist. So don't. 

I write.