Dear Elena at sixteen,
You think reading fast is a virtue because the comprehension tests reward it. You underline entire pages because highlighter yellow feels like achievement. Slow down. The novel you rush through for the book report will visit you again at thirty — and the second time, you will weep on the MRT not from sadness exactly, but from recognition delayed.
Your teacher who assigns poetry is not punishing you. She is offering a rope across years. Take it. Memorise one poem not for grades but for the night you cannot sleep and need someone else's rhythm to borrow.
You will become a teacher yourself and then leave the classroom — not because you stopped loving literature, but because you wanted to write without grading anyone. That choice will confuse relatives at New Year dinners. Let them be confused.
The boy who borrows your copy of The Great Gatsby and returns it with a folded corner will not matter in five years. The notebook with the torn cover will matter in twenty. Keep it. Fill it with bad poems and honest observations about the bus route from Toa Payoh.
Also: stop apologising for reading during recess. The girls who laugh will not remember the title. You will remember the shade under the block where you sat, the heat on your neck, the page where you first understood that sentences can hold feelings you do not yet have names for.
Keep the notebook with the torn cover. Future you will want proof that you already cared about sentences before caring became your work. You are not late. You are early. The work catches up when you stop running toward it.
From the studio,
Elena