when will my flowers bloom.

foreword

I was a poet before I was a novelist.

I remember when I first thought of writing something. I was nine and bored in class. A paper and a pencil were all I had.

Then I started writing. I fell in love with it.  Then I forgot it for a while.

It wasn't until I was in eighth grade that I picked up writing again. I realized that during this age, people discover what they want in life (a select few, but some people really do) and they start doing something about it.

It wasn't until my English teacher assigned us to pass three poems as a graded activity that I realized that writing them was going to be my thing. I wrote my first poem for an hour, using basic rhyming schemes. I don't really know what I was doing but I just wrote.

My childhood friend from that grade read it and she was delighted by what I created. She was my first fan. She was the first person who ever saw my poems and told me to make more.

So I did.

I once challenged myself to write a poem for thirty minutes. I succeeded. Since then, I've been writing poems for that amount of time. My friend would always read it. She would tell me if she liked it or not. Most of the time she did.

That's how I started. Just an eighth-grader that happened to have an English task to pass.

Since then, I was always writing poems. I wrote them whenever, wherever. In the waiting shed, in the car, in the classroom, in my room. I wrote poems whenever I got bored. I wrote them when I can't sleep. I wrote them when I don't have anything else to write.

So I became this crazy poet with her crazy rhymes. I thought  I was awesome back then. My friend wasn't the only one that read the poems I wrote. I showed them to other people as well. Classmates, batchmates, friends from other places. They all loved them.

Looking back, I don't know if they're just feeding my ego or if they really think my poems were that good. They keep telling me that my poems invoke emotion or something along that line. I always believed them.

Now, as I compile my olden poems in this book, I was pretty sure that they're just feeding my ego back then.

I was not going to promise you exquisite, meaningful poems. These were how the thirteen-year-old me saw the world. This was how simple my line of thinking was.  It's up to you to decide if you agree with my friends back then or this collection was nothing but flaming rubbish.

Perhaps, the graphics I made would convince you that this was a good poem collection.