Life is a journey. So is writing. I have neglected this little part of me, this part that started off like a beautiful accident, my pretty child conceived without contraceptives.

I realise I owe a lot of my success or writing maturity or this so-called talent to a lot of people.

Xinyi, I am staring at you.

To be honest I had never intended to start writing at all, until I met this plump girl in primary six. She looked angelic, very cherubic -- her eyes and long hair lent her a sort of childish innocence shoujo mangakas scrabble about in their too-romanticised minds and Neverland hearts to come up with. We ended up sitting together (again an unintended accident, people who I thought were my friends in primary five had grouped together and I knew no one and by chance there was a seat empty, right next to her).

I laugh now when I think about how naive, how foolish I was. As always in our formative years of puberty, the events of that year will always remain etched in my mind and has formed some part of who I am today. No, not just writing. My fear of betrayal. My misandry and reclusiveness. My inability to trust others wholly, and my hatred of Chinese.

Fine, the last one happened a long time ago, but I shall not reveal it here because I am embarrassed about leaving so much of my personal history on this crumb of the Internet. Call this my confession, my midnight comfort, my escape into the arms of a stranger, a parisian whore in silent films and cigarette incense. (Holy crap this is getting real angsty and arty-farty).

Back then, I had been plagued with the most insane case of acne ( it looked like the Chernobyl incident had somehow stretched across years to mutate my forehead into an arid wasteland riddled with pus. Yuck), a condition that has somehow abated (thank you, body wash...DON'T LISTEN TO WHAT MAGAZINES TELL YOU. SCREW FACIAL WASH).

Well that year was miserable and lonely indeed, and I had never anticipated exams more. I had admired my seatmate (in a purely platonic way), and thought her anime-style drawings and compositions and poetry impressive. I thought I would never surpass her in language, and had placed her on a pedestal in my young mind.

I had continued to worship her as a literary genius, and that impression continued for the majority of my secondary one year, where I tried to imitate her style as closely as possible.

But

I had discovered Shakespeare, and Nabokov, as well as CAP.

Somewhere along the line this friend -or acquaintance, as she insists on calling herself...till this day I have not managed to unravel her psyche in my fuzzy memories of her- had crowned Twilight as 'the greatest/marvellous work by Stephenie Meyer'.

Now, reading back, I wince. Then I shake my head and tut. But back then...ah, I think I would have believed her and been another mindless zombie to the legions of scary, obsessive, necrophilia-supporting sissy-vampire-crazy fangirls.

Except that necrophilia is much cooler and more disturbing. Can you imagine fucking a dead body, so cold and wet and slimy with decay hanging as your aprohsidiac(sp? Mr learn-to-spell can you check this one out? Thanks a lot!) and the maggots crawling and writhing around your penis? (No idea if it's possible for girls to have sex with a dead body because a dead man cannot sustain an erection hard enough fro penetration right? So says the Bio textbook.) YAY NECROPHILIA. Ahem. I seem to have gone off tangent. Now back to the topic...

So where was I? Ah yes, the infamous work, Twilight, bane of my life, curse of my bookshelf! Even if I am an atheist, I am thanking God that I didn't wholeheartedly believe her and fangirl over the book. I am thanking God I have this wonderful subject called English Literature. I am thanking God for letting me meet Mr Davamoni. It's true -- success is 10% talent, 30% hard work and 60% luck. Without meeting Mr Davamoni on that fateful day where he made us pen that introductory piece and me writing that god-awful angsty poem I would never have tried getting into CAP, would never have failed, would never have worked harder to defy the Gods and learnt more about the art I was increasingly falling in love with, would never have achieved A1 for lit and choose to take it as a subject for streaming. If not for Mr Davamoni's encouragement, or rather, "Please hand in your portfolio to me next year. I expect to see it.", I would never have grudgingly collated my work, never have submitted it, and never gotten into CAP, then mentorship, then Avron, or even got a chance to get my poem published in an anthology, which means a lot to me.

People always ask me how I got my English to be so 'powerful', to be so fluent in it. I smile and say that the words just come out. That I love the language. I may have been lying.

I was not always good at English. I think I hated it at one point, completely abhorred doing stupid compositions about boys who stupidly get stuck in the elevator or something. The same old boring thing. But, if not for meeting her, if not for admiring this person, if not for wanting to be her and imitating her poetry, I wouldn't have been where I am today.

I owe you a lot. Thank you.

Thank you for letting me read your poems on that rainy day, where the water was like agar-agar, rolling off the turrets of the roof in knotted ropes.

Thank you for giving me a glimpse into the artistic mind, pondering, searching for words, in the drawings and unfinished poems scribbled between lines of your composition pad, at the corner of your chinese textbook (because now I find myself doing the same thing).

Thank you for being so patient with me, for introducing me to so many new words, for letting me read your compositions.

Thank you for teaching me to see the world in other ways, that princes and princesses Disneyfied weren't always so perfect, that the world isn't perfect.

Thank you for making -no, forcing- my to see that the villain also has a story to tell. That everyone has stories in this metropolis of 5 million, maybe more, maybe less.

Thank you for letting me learn, for being my inspiration in the beginning, for letting me see the wonders of Art and the meaning in lines. For showing me that words aren't just a skill but also a long-suffering metaphor, a beauty, an emotion from the heart.

Thank you also, for being there for me when I was choosing poems for my first -but failed- portfolio.

Thank you for introducing me to dA.

I am truly grateful, even if I can't exactly call you 'friend', even if my jokes weren't funny then, but I thought you should know that I am your Judas, because I didn't really stand up for you when others call you 'scary' and 'weird'. I am a hypocrite, and yadda yadda. I'm a screwed up human with unresolved issues. So are you.

We weren't really close but I still admired you at some point, as the totem of my childhood, into the shaky adolescent years, with my insufferable pride and superiority. I love poetry and prose now, and would never part with it, even for the world. Call it youthful idealism, but I need a moment to pretend to be foolish, to do stupid things and still be able to get away with it. I'm not yet ready to escape my sanctuary, my utopia of words into the demanding world where success is so narrow, so defined by awards and achievements, and chances only come once.

Somewhere along my journey I have taken one shaky step past your position, and I don't know if you're proud of me, or jealous, because that one day we blocked each other on MSN - me out of pride, you out of disgust (when you found out I had been reading Shakespeare for fun instead of manga). Maybe you're still in your Neverland, and I had long grown too jaded with pretty words without meaning, and am searching for something new, something better. This isn't good, I know at this rate I will never be satisfied. Yet I cannot stop, because if I grow lenient others will surpass me. Success is indeed a double edged sword.

How are you today? Do you still write love stories about vampires and hide in the fractals of your imagination? We are the same, all writers are the same, we are megalomaniacs with low self-esteem, dodging and hiding from the world, pretending we know better and dispensing advice like sages past our time.

But somehow, though blood, sweat, tears, chocolate and insomnia, I had miraculously surpassed her...without realising it. I had moved on.
Earlier I said I might have been lying about loving the language. It's a white lie, I do love the language now and thus make it my life's mission to know everything about it like a lover does, but this all began with a need to prove and validate my self-esteem. My journey wasn't smooth, I faced a lot of obstacles from my parents, ("You'll never get into CAP. Do you think you're good enough? Don't waste your time." -- Father) and sweat (learning, memorising vocabulary, reading voraciously and struggling to comprehend Shakespeare, trying to understand why he was so great), as well as tears (defeat. Disappointment. I didn't get in. I'm worthless. Scribbled poems with bad rhyming schemes by the side of my lit paper when I first failed Clay Marble.). The courage to start over, to write more, to learn from mistakes and ask for concrit, to be better, to learn to laugh at my mistakes and accept even the most scathing criticism. To stop my brain from exploding when I tried to understand Shakespeare's metaphors, and struggle from falling asleep when I encountered Jane Austen (Today she still bugs me. I know why I am supposed to love her but I can't bring myself to like her characters. UGH.). It took me a lot of passion, a lot of hard work and belief. You can say that it took half of my life away.

So, don't look down on language. Don't think it's so easy to be so fluent. That's why I get pissed off when SOMEONE surpasses me in English in just 6 months. I may look like I put very little effort into English, btu bear in mind, my journey took years. It's not fair that my years of sweat, blood and tears become futile with some upstart stealing my glory in a few months of sweat. Fuck you.

I understand everyone at CAP also had similar journeys to mine. My friends, those I talked to at Avron told me that they found their getting into the programme unexpected as they had previously failed English. We put in hard work and effort to better ourselves. We fight struggles everyday, against reason. I will not accept defeat unless you too have been working extremely hard in your writing journey, and sincerely love English. I refuse to lose my first place in the language, or getting higher grades than me if they do it just for the grade, just for that A1 to pretty up their report cards. I don't care whether you're from America or Antarctica or China or Korea (or from some distal galaxy), if you don't love the subject and score better than me, fuck you. Life's fucking unfair.

I love English. I love writing. I love reading, and Kafka, and nearly all the literary geniuses, even if I don't really understand why they are so great now. I love my proofreaders, my friends, select teachers (because I will always be indebted to them). I love dA, and I will always remember my humble beginnings, my roots. However, I will still maintain my stand that I wrote better at sec one. (inside joke between Hari, Sheena and I). I don't recall making that many grammatical errors, even if about 90% of it was purple prose.

Edifice buildings...*snicker*

This is a letter to myself, to that person (who shall remain unnamed because if she ever finds my blog, damn, will it be awkward) and a reminder that somewhere in the month of December, year 2009, there is a little girl, maybe not-so-little girl, who wrote passionately and emotionally. Who penned her dreams and gratitude. In case some day I might be washed away in the tides of Success and Pursuit and Money, as well as Influence and Politics. I want the internet to remember this, even if someday I dismiss it as childish ramblings of a tween.

To childhood. To dreams. To 'Holy shit Twilight stinks! But it's an ego boost, especially when you feel your writing stinks!'

Holycrap this became a speech o.o But finally ahh that felt good. I think I finally got into the writing mode!

Finally a very big ILU to all my friends at Chungcheng! And long-lost tribes of associates from TNS! I may finally be able to face my demons, and proclaim a very loud 'fuck you' to backstabbers. Maybe curse them to having weird fetishes/bad complexions...because OH NO A PIMPLE ON MY NOSE ARGGGHHH IT'S THE ARMAGEDDON! NUUUUUU!

*cackles evilly* Because to a teenage girl, a clear complexion is everything. BWAHAHAHAHA

YAY WRITER CHANEL IS BACK TO KICK YOUR ASS. HAHA INCEST NECROPHILIA HOMOPHOBES DEATH THE STRANGE HERE I COME.

Oh noes! Foiled by my A Math TYS! ARGHHH HOW HOW HOW.