You know how I started my blogging career? By writing about my heartbreaks. This was during the Geocities days where you had to manually write each page’s HTML through Notepad.
You know what would’ve happened had I been lucky with the girls? I wouldn’t have had any reason to share my collection of cringe-rants. And I’ll tell you, my posts were so emo they could’ve fronted for My Chemical Romance.
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Photo: Deon Black
“Hey, any idea what’s cool to do around here?”
The woman I’d just spoken to held her book closer to her chest, sidestepping away like a crab. No reply, no smile. In fact, she scrunched her face as if I smelled like goat droppings.
I still cringe at the memory of me talking up to random girls in the shopping mall, just because I’d gotten a copy of The Game during my young adulthood, and I thought it that it would be the key to my relationship problems.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
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Photo: Luan Cabral
“I think you’re in a cult,” I said.
“You’re just not used to it,” Sara replied.
“Not used to what, a man telling me that mercury is medicine?”
“Forget it,” she said, more to keep me quiet than to concede her point. The other volunteers still flitted around us, packing up the event space and patting each other’s backs for a job well done. Some of them glanced sideways as they overheard my skeptic thoughts.
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Photo: Kelly Sikkema
“I think we should break up.”
“Right,” I said. I slipped the paper rose I’d been hiding back into my pocket.
“I just want to be honest,” Lana said. She pointed out the main entrance of the shopping mall, where her new boyfriend was waiting in his car. “It’s just that he has… you know… and you don’t… you know…”
Money, she meant money. To be fair, it was one of the most honest breakups I’d ever had to endure. You had to give her credit for that.
“I get it,” I said. “Okay then. Guess I gotta go back to work.”
“You’re not mad?”
Mad? She’d been hanging out with this guy all week, told me he was just a friend she hadn’t met in a while, was breaking up with me for him, and they were heading off on a date right after this, while I’d have to spend the remaining hours of my shift dealing with customers trying to haggle a couple bucks off our pirated Playstation 2 games.
Sometimes I tell my dog,
‘I love you, understand?’
I know she really doesn’t
But I take her waggy tail
as a reply.
And then they’re days I feel
that something much, much bigger
is giving me what’s best
And all I know is to
curse up towards the heavens
My very little version
of a waggy tail
Your Friendly Malaysian Writer 