Who is writing

I am Priya. I was born in Singapore, grew up in the east, and have lived in Simei long enough that the bus routes changed twice and I still remember the old numbers. I am not a full-time writer. I work in office administration — scheduling, records, the quiet labour that keeps departments from losing their minds — and I write on this site in the hours that remain, which are fewer than I would like and more than I sometimes deserve after wasting an evening on nothing.

Pen Drift began as a notebook habit. I kept a ruled ledger on my desk at home and filled it with sentences about commutes, meals, weather, the small friction of daily life in an HDB estate. A friend said I should put some of it online so it would survive if my flat flooded, which was a joke until the ceiling leak in 2024, after which it was less funny and more practical. I registered the domain, built plain pages without a platform or a comment section, and started filing notes the way I file paper: date, title, text, done.

I write in Singapore English because it is the English I think in — organise, hawker, void deck, MRT, kopi, all of it. I do not perform a voice for an audience. If a sentence sounds like me talking to my cousin over dinner, it stays. If it sounds like a press release, I delete it. My influences are boring and honest: school composition teachers who penalised adjectives, office memos that taught me clarity, the Lianhe Zaobao obituaries that say more in three lines than some novels say in three chapters.

What I am not: a journalist, a therapist, a public figure, a brand. I do not accept guest posts or sponsored content. I do not have a mailing list. I do not sell ebooks or courses. This site costs me a domain fee and hosting and the time I spend writing instead of sleeping. That is the full business model.

My subjects are deliberately narrow. I write about places I walk — park connectors, MRT platforms, kopitiams, market stairs — and about evenings at the kitchen table or desk when the city outside slows enough to hear. I wrote one longer piece about an evening near Chin Swee Road because I was there and saw something from a distance and came home unable to pretend the walk was ordinary. I do not write crime details. I do not write political campaigns. I do not tell you how to live.

I live alone in a four-room flat with too many notebooks and a view of other people's laundry. My family is nearby — cousins in the west, parents in Ang Mo Kio — and I see them on weekends when we are not all too tired. I drink kopi si kosong most mornings if I eat out, and instant coffee at the office if I must. I walk for exercise without tracking steps because numbers make me competitive in ways that ruin a walk.

If you read everything here, you will know me better than most strangers and worse than anyone who has shared a meal with me. That is the correct level of intimacy for a personal blog. I am not hiding behind a persona, but I am also not confessing everything. Some pages are private. Some evenings are too dull to file. Some thoughts stay in the paper ledger and never reach the screen.

Thank you for reading. If something here resonates, you may write to me at the address on the find me page. I read email in weekday evenings, SGT, and I reply when I have something worth saying back — not always quickly, but honestly.