Today I read a book! Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. It's a reimagining of Shakespeare's life (and of his wife Anne Hathaway). I loved it so much.

Some books feel like cool blankets pulled up to your chin, all smooth and crisp to the touch, the equivalent of a literary hug. And you feel very calm and very quiet, like running your hand across a bedsheet. Jane Austen makes me feel like that, and more recently, this book. I actually missed my bus stop and ended up on the expressway because I was reading hahahah it was a nice feeling because I haven't been so absorbed in a long time and it was raining and you know that feeling of being lost in a good book. Quite marvellous if it weren't for the panic haah.

I was reading a goodreads review and the reviewer said the prose was purple and too flowery, but I was thinking that was the exact reason I like it so much? You know how sometimes you are desperately trying to describe a feeling, to snare it in words, but somehow it eludes you, and you try to put your point across in a flurry of words that don't sit right on their own, but together they puzzle out the meaning? Yeah. It's really beautiful, and so sad, and full of loss, but I like it a lot. This is maybe my book soulmate hahahaha. The yearning melancholy of it.

I've been trying to write another story, but the words don't seem to be coming out. I realised recently, that I've stopped dreaming. Somewhere along the way I gave up thinking of a future of myself. I saw this and I thought yes. That's me.

Or maybe I've always wanted to write that sometimes the force of that yearning, that desire, it quite unnerves me. I'm afraid to write because I don't want people to read my writing, to ask me what I'm writing because I wouldn't have an answer. Sometimes the words come, but recently they have been stuttering. 

I've been having the other kind of dreams lately, the ones that come with sleep. Every night, I lie down and say my prayers and every night I'm swept up in dreams so clear, I wake up and think about them.

Last night I dreamt I had to take a maths test and i forgot my calculator and the friends from school I haven't talked to in years were there and they drove me around looking for a calculator in the school of business and then to look for Yong tau foo. But it didn't matter because I got back my maths paper and my teacher looked and me and smiled and said gently: you didn't study right. And I said yes, and on the paper I received the first F in my life.

I think I'm stressed hahahah writing this down I see definitely a fear of failure and maybe envy, thinking of the people I've gone to school with, wondering about their lives and where I've ended up. The problem is, I think, is that I'm so afraid of moving, of letting people down, of being looked at. So now I know I have to work on that haha

But anyway, it's been a nice humbling experience. I'm grateful.