Somber slice for a sour soul

For those who know me, know that I can’t bake even to save my life. Every attempt is like a gibberish of stars that won't just form a constellation. While I goose down gawking at the faded orange oven light from up close, there's a cake-casper giggling and cursing my cake on the road to damnation.

Grief has taken too many shapes for me.

Sometimes it's the stale-musty comfort of no sun for a couple of weeks.

Sometimes it's not sleeping for nights and leaving the bed in the morning only to watch the sun with a defying gaze. As if I'm nearly about to cuss it. Don't worry, I don't.

Sometimes it's like surrendering to my self-founded language and turning down the common tongue, leaving me insulated from the world.

Don't hear don’t tell.

Tonight, getting out of bed has a greater sense. A sense that I wonder who authored in my mind, maybe it was the cake-casper. After all I was his favourite bungling muse.

I can't find vanilla essence. Should I wake my mother? But it's 3 am. There’s pineapple essence. But i'm allergic to pineapples. Oh but it doesn't matter. Essence isn’t real.

I mix the unpromising ingredients in a cheap Korean Bowl with a hope it might at least be a good imposter if not a cake. I mix it anti-clockwise and then an aggressive essay to mix the other way, I remember how my best friend snapped while we were baking together the other day.

“ONLY IN ONE DIRECTION” she said.

For I didn't have the courage to ask this connoisseur if it was a science thing or something she was fastidious about, like for me it was always counting stairs, and only stepping on even numbered tiles or else I would die.

Although I’m pretty sure our better half for whom we were baking it for wouldn't notice even if I stealthily stirred the mix in any direction. She’d still be hugging us. I smiled as these memories ran loose from my souvenir shop reminding me how much I missed them.

I take out a heart shaped baking mould just to mock the creations of indivisible lovers while they hold their melting hands in purgatory.

I sat on the floor, still ogling at the orange glass like a little kid outside a toy store.That kid has no idea their forlorn feelings of hopefulness has been banalising my desire to eat a cake.

Counting the polka dots on my pyjamas and colouring some endless thoughts that I should probably lobotomise, I was saved by the bell.

Judgement day.

It's a lot darker than it is supposed to be. Though it's brown but not the usual kind. it's, you know, Somber brown.

The colour somber or the feeling somber you ask?

“I like the colour of your hair, emm it's somber but I like it” a friend from high-school once told me. I’ve always thought about what it really meant.

What was this colour?

The kind which doesn't impress. The kind they don’t rivet in movies.The kind that is not documented in love letters, for it is the kind that nobody loves.But what she said was like a bandaid to the maladies of my heart. Maybe this cake was also the same kind? It's not perfect. Why would it be?

The creator is tainted, and we still lay it on the creation?

I know, like a bandaid this burnt cake doesn't chant “it is the east and Juliet is the sun” But at least this can fix things for me tonight. Maybe it's the bandaid that I needed. For every wound split by a failure, this was it.

Just a way of saying that it's okay, you’re being too hard on yourself. You can still be calm, smile and take out that cake. Or maybe on better days, bid a goodbye to all the Caspers and tell them to come back later. Because it's okay.

After all, It was never about the cake.