Almost (幾乎)

Tokyo, 2004. A young songwriter searches old boxes for a cassette she recorded once, alone, in a school music room, and never played for anyone. She finds a photograph instead: a beach at night, a fire, a group of teenagers not ready to admit something is over. The boy she's looking for isn't in it at all. She still knows exactly where he would have been standing. And in the centre, her best friend, laughing. An excellent impression of being fine.

So she starts to write.

Taipei, 1993. Room 9093. Forty students. Yan is fifteen, quietly writing everything down, because she can already feel time moving. There is a best friend who sees more than Yan admits. And a year later, a transfer student, and a desk behind the last row that was simply there one morning, already waiting. A boy who draws door hinges in his notebook margins. Their study sessions run long past the point of needing them. Neither says why.

Graduation is coming. Edinburgh for him. Montreal for her.

Almost (幾乎) is her account of those three years, told as a memoir annotated in her own margins, where the songs of her youth take shape, line by line, in English and Chinese. And underneath them, the word she refused to write down.

Book One of the 9093 Series.