Suhaila

My name is Suhaila. I am thirty-one, unmarried, and I rent a flat on Simei Street 4 with a view of the car park and, on clear mornings, the top of a rain tree that someone planted years ago and nobody remembers planting. I work in publishing support for a firm near Tampines — proofreading, metadata, the quiet machinery of books other people write — and I come home most evenings through the interchange, past the bubble tea shops and the aunties who sell curry puffs from a table outside the minimart.

I started this blog because I kept noticing the same kind of gap and had nowhere to put it. Not dramatic gaps. Not the kind people photograph. The aunty at the kopitiam who loses the thread of her story halfway through. The letter in my grandmother’s tin that ends mid-sentence on the last sheet she ever wrote. The photograph inside a second-hand book where someone cropped out whoever stood at the left edge. These are the unfinished parts that structure an ordinary day in Singapore if you pay attention, and they vanish if you do not write them down.

I am not a writer by profession and I do not pretend to be one. I have no publisher, no newsletter, no social media strategy. I do not accept sponsorships or review products. This site is hosted cheaply and maintained on Sunday afternoons when I have nothing else to do. The photographs are stock images chosen to match the neighbourhoods I describe — I am not talented enough with a camera to do them justice myself.

What I notice: stories that stop. Tapes that run out before the song ends. Pages that are blank except for a heading. People who begin an anecdote and then remember they are not supposed to tell it. I am patient in the way of someone who has learned that rushing past these moments means missing the only interesting part of the day.

If you read something here that sounds like your aunty, your neighbour, your regular coffee shop — it might be, and it might not. I change small details to protect people who did not ask to appear in a blog. The feelings are true. The addresses are real. The names are not.

Say hello if you like. I read every message myself.