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CAKE MAGAZINE #4
The Sulky Emblem
TEXT: Daniel Eng

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TREVVY.COM
Chase That Chub
TEXT: Daniel Eng
22/07/2008

I once knew this boy.

He lived his life through the people who surrounded him. He held their hands through their mistakes and learned their lessons. He was always two paces behind, watching and never being watched.

Every morning he would get out of his bed, stumble through the daily rituals and watch his loved ones fail. He would then return home, strip down bare and fall into his bed, nothing short of exhausted.

He never questioned the choices he made, because he didn’t allow room for doubt. Every step taken was determined by a series of careful calculations. He took pride in knowing that every next step would hit solid ground.

That was, until one ordinary day alike any other, it didn’t.

Neither did it make any sense. He was confused, trapped in a free fall that didn’t seem to end, and in his head he thumbed through justifications after justifications to his plight only to draw blanks after blanks.

Days passed, months crawled by. He didn’t stop falling, and he still didn’t know why.

He couldn’t decide which would kill him first — rock bottom, or the fact that for the first time in his life, he had no reign or reason.

Broken dreams have a funny way of catching up with you. You can run to ends of the earth, you can seek shelter behind the thickest Chinese walls, but they always find their way back to you.

It’s as if you left a trail of cookie crumbs in anticipation of their haunting. They seek, they smile and they fucking tear you apart.

I’ve spent months letting him take care of me. He licked my wounds and filled up the gaps in me. I was empty, then I was full, then empty again.

He’d kiss me to sleep and kiss me awake. We cuddled for warmth and whispered breaths were exchanged religiously. He smelt like a girl but fucked nothing close to one. We were happy, we were beautiful and we were in love.

‘He’ and ‘we’ were pronouns that hung tightly by my lips. Rarely came an occasion when ‘I’ played a part in our relationship. It reached a point where ‘I’ became irrelevant to what we had. We had what we had formulated on that very principle — that ‘I’ had no part to play.

I think that was the point where we stopped working, when the truth of the matter was that I was losing myself to the one thing I practically breathed on. I had dreams that we didn’t share; I had questions that we didn’t have answers to.

On some level, we both knew we were on a one way street, yet our destinations couldn’t be further apart from each other. The wounds he’d lick started to be the ones he etched, the gaps he filled — the ones he emptied.

The inevitable fallout fell nicely into place across the span of months, and the rest became history. I became history in his, and him, mine. I lost a best friend, my first love—my only love to date, actually—but the one thing I truly, truly lost… was myself.

I lost myself to the vicariousness of the moment, I lost myself in his eyes. I lost myself to his lies, I lost myself in the insanity love evokes. I lost myself to the idea that losing him was all that mattered, and I lost myself to weakness.

I’ve lived, I’ve loved, and I’ve lost.

And the most absurd part of it all, is that I owe him that much.

Losing you taught me a lot of things.

It taught me how to accept your absence. It taught me how to deal. It taught me how to slither through your lies, and it taught me how the eventual truth stung. It taught me how to let you go. It taught me how to tip toe across a rope strung so tight. It taught me happiness that didn’t involve you. It taught me how to look into your eyes and not see what I loved. It taught me how to love you in past tense. It taught me how to forget you momentarily. It taught me how to survive the lonesome nights; it taught me how to stride through the quiet days.

What losing you failed to teach me, was how to lose you, for tonight—I am clueless.

I row my boat down your river, and I wish for easy sailing, but then I calm the shore and I’m not like I was before. So I close a door, and I leave you wanting more.