EW26

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

Nothing new, but I remember the day I went to your school for the first time like it was just yesterday.

It's been five years but I still know what I was wearing, I can easily retrace the steps I took towards the running tracks, I can picture your friend's head poking out of the grandstand and calling out to me. I immediately ran, and her voice still rings clear to me, Eh, eh don't run! 

They were your first friends that I met collectively, but somehow they did a good enough job to make me feel welcome. I didn't feel completely out of place, even with my different exterior and cluelessness to the inside jokes.

But that didn't stay long, because you left eight months later, taking them with you. I don't blame them for taking your side, because they were your friends after all. But it didn't stop the insecurity from growing inside me, even when we finally got back together end 2014.

Each time you mentioned one of them I got riled up inside, imagining them saying mean things about me. It was clear your secondary school friends had big mouths, saying you can do better, asking why you'd lick back what you've spat out, whether the child is really yours. I could imagine what your ITE friends would have said as well.

It didn't help that you easily made friends wherever you go, formed bonds so tight that I can't get in and you immediately forget my existence. There will always be an army on your side, prepared to walk against me the moment you declare I am the enemy.

The girl who is a dancer. The friend that keeps pretending he is half British when he is clearly Malay. The only one in the group whose passion is actually hospitality. Any of their names were enough to make me insecure, imagining words they probably never even said, then blaming you and wishing I was the only one in your circle.

Two years ago before my Bali trip, you boarded the train here to two stations prior, where I waited on the stairs. You'd been sweating from your futsal game, and I had been crying because I told you not to go and you did. You enveloped me in hug after hug, but I wouldn't stop.

It's just a fucking game, you snapped eventually.

But it wasn't, and I wish you knew.

My insecurity started with Lakeside, where you fed it with the friendships you had at ITE. It never stopped growing and scattered all over the country, bits in the north and pieces in the stations to come.