About
Who keeps these traces
I am Ryan. I live at Blk 130 Bukit Batok West Avenue 6 and spend most of my weeks moving between Bukit Batok, Gombak, and the bus routes that connect them.
LifeTrace began as a folder of phone notes I did not want to delete. A time stamp. A smell. A sentence overheard on a platform. I realised that if I did not write these down, they would compress into a general feeling — "a normal week" — with nothing to show for the specificity I had lived through.
I work a regular office schedule, which means my writing happens in margins: mornings before leaving for the MRT, evenings at the kopitiam downstairs, Sundays when the market is loud and the flat is quiet. I am not trying to build an audience or sell a version of myself. I am trying to preserve impressions with the same care you might give a photograph before the colours shift.
The name LifeTrace comes from how I think about memory. A trace is not the whole object — it is the mark left after contact. A ring on a table. A crease in a ticket. A corridor that feels different after one bad minute. I write in first person because these are my marks, not a survey of the town.
Some entries are peaceful. Some are unsettling. In May I wrote about an evening near Block 248 Choa Chu Kang Avenue 2 when I witnessed the aftermath of a nearby dispute. I included only what I saw and heard, with gaps where gaps belong. I believe witness writing should admit its limits rather than perform completeness.
You can reach me at [email protected] or through the contact form. If you lived near an entry and remember it differently, I welcome careful correction — memory is collaborative even when it feels private.
I do not offer advice here, and I do not speak for my neighbours. I offer records — faint, dated, honest — of what one person noticed before the day moved on.
Thank you for reading. If a line resonates, it may be because you have your own version of the same afternoon, unwritten, still sharp in your chest. Maybe you will write it down too.
I keep a paper map of the west taped inside my cupboard door — bus routes drawn in pencil, erased and redrawn when services change. LifeTrace is the digital layer on top: dates, sentences, the places where my pencil paused.