About
Who draws these lines
A personal blog from Queenstown — partial maps, honest gaps, and the small marks ordinary days leave on paper.
My name is Ivan. I live in a flat off Commonwealth Drive, in the part of Queenstown where the old blocks and the newer ones share corridors and the same bus routes. I am not a writer by trade. I work in an office that has nothing to do with maps, though I keep a drawer of scrap paper at home and draw routes on it when I cannot sleep.
MindTrace started because I wanted a place to put incomplete things. Not unfinished in the sense of sloppy — incomplete in the sense of honest. A memory that stops before the corner. A kopitiam order remembered by someone else better than by me. A child drawing on MRT glass while I stand there with an empty page.
I notice filament-thin details: how ticket stubs crease when you fold them into a tin, how library loan cards outlast the walks you took to return the books, how light in Dover market falls in stripes that do not reach the floor evenly. I write about those because they are the coordinates I trust. The rest — the big explanations, the tidy conclusions — I leave blank.
I am careful about names and about events I did not witness directly. The main article on this site describes an evening near Chin Swee Road when I heard noise and sirens and learned later that something serious had happened nearby. I say that once, without detail, because my map of that night has a gap in it and I refuse to colour over the gap.
If you live around Queenstown or Commonwealth and recognise a table, a stall, a corridor — I hope these entries read as one neighbour thinking aloud, not as someone claiming to speak for the block. I am one person with one angle. The city is larger than any single map.
I would rather publish a line that stops than a line I cannot defend.
You can read the journal from the archive page, or say hello through the contact form if something here is wrong or if you simply want to compare notes on a route we might share.
A note on what this site is
What you read here is my own writing — notes, memories and opinions as they were when I set them down. These posts are personal reflections, not medical, legal, financial or fitness guidance. I describe places and everyday moments from my own point of view; I do not name or speak for anyone else, and I try to write about my neighbourhood with care and honesty. If I have got something wrong, tell me and I will fix it.