EW16/NE3

Disclaimer: please read this series of posts starting from EW29, then backwards.

So familiar to me, even though it was your workplace and not mine. You dreaded this station every morning, even though the traffic jams on the causeway always helped you avoid the peak hours.

After your POP, 2016 became the year of still waters, when nobody departed, nobody was left shaken and struggling to heal. I had my books to pull me through, a different one every two days; I read on the train for these fifteen stations, only pausing when I had to walk to Police Cantonment Complex.

I already knew the time you would usually leave, and I even knew that you would take your own sweet time walking down, talking to your colleagues. But I didn't mind. In fact, I deliberately started leaving earlier just so I had more time to read.

Even if we had a fight earlier, or if we hadn't spoken for hours, the moment an off day rolled around, your workplace remained a habit. Maybe it was just another place to run to, resembling my intuition to hop on a bus to Bishan everytime. But I would faithfully wait on those chairs at the lobby, waiting for your familiar figure to sit next to me.

But with this loyalty came our biggest enemy: insecurity. With every day you finally sat beside me after an hour of waiting, you rushed me, so your friends wouldn't catch up. Malu lah, you said, which I was too, of course. At least, it wasn't great enough to take control of me.

Somewhere along the way my shyness turned into a grudge. You left again, taking them with you, the tallest guy and the one who regularly comes to my store and the one who drives you to Johor, and anyone else who had seen me. You talked about me, telling them the monstrous side of me that made you leave.

She has feelings for my best friend, I can imagine you say. Me and my overworking brain, conjuring up words that they never said, just like I imagined with your secondary school and ITE friends.

They were the ones mostly there for you during the whole season, from the relationship to the break-up and from your desperation to get me back to our last attempt at reconciliation. They were the ones who warned you against me, who said you were blind for being with me, who said you were the good-looking one.

Their words, be they the ones they actually spoke or the ones I made up; they contributed to my insecurity, making me believe I wasn't good enough for you. To my grudge, making me wish you wouldn't go out with them where they would huddle around you and shut me out of your circle.

They were just a handful of the people who pulled you away from me.

When you left last year, you blocked me on social media and my number. You escaped seeing the desperate texts I'd sent you, though I thought you were just ignoring them. Three months later in a hotel room, you read them back from my phone, seeing just how pathetic I'd been.

I'll fetch you next week. Please. Don't leave. I'm sorry. I'll die without you.

You were almost in tears, you apologised again, and you said You should have just come. It would have made a difference if I saw your face. 

For that one time, I was disloyal to my routine. I instead gallivanted to the west and passed by Outram Park with pride, pretending you had boarded and was looking at me with disdain. I was long gone with my ego while you were long gone with the boys of Cantonment.