Work Text:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman , Song of Myself
Every week, I make the long trek to your home. Out of the train station, past the playground and the bus stop that’s always filled with empty buses waiting for passengers, I take the left side of the road. The left side is always the shorter route to your home compared to the right, while the right is shorter when I’m walking back from your home to the station. Peculiar. You told me those empty buses led to your home, but only after they had made their rounds around the neighbourhood. It’s faster if I walk, the only downsides being the afternoon sun and my sweat-slicked back at the end of the journey.
I come across the house where the owner sweeps his driveyard to Buddhist chants playing on repeat from a recorder positioned on the gate. If he isn’t there, his dog takes his place behind the fence and never fails to bark at me each time I peek at it through the gaps. I marvel at the house that’s being demolished at the end of the street and the expanse of all its rubble, pondering once more about whose decision it could have been to place a vending machine opposite the house with its rows of Red Bull. Crossing the road, I see the cafe I’m glad we got to have dinner at once. (We returned to your place to snooze after that. I woke up in the middle of the night and tried to leave quietly but I still woke you. With an arm around me, you brought me close to you, kissed me deeply and thanked me for the good night. Your belly was unimaginably softer than usual that night, and I remembered how nice it felt for a long while. That was the last date we had before you broke up with me the next time we met. It was easy to forget how before we left for the cafe, I had sat on your sofa crying about how I couldn’t feel the affection you proclaimed you had for me with your lack of texts, lack of initiation to plan dates, and lack of curiosity about my life. I cried and expressed my fear: that if I never texted you first, we would never meet again. Once again, you had bestowed upon me your wisdom, the reason for my constant dissatisfaction in our relationship: I was being negative and thinking the worst of you just like I do everyone else. Once again, I accepted your words as gospel. We made up by making out—me sitting on your lap as we kissed.)
Cross another road and I’m walking along the perimeter of a school that’s always empty, even on weekdays. Just a little further and there’s the house that looks exactly like the evil witch’s candy house from Hansel and Gretel. Opposite the candy house is the one with a small feisty dog that barks at anyone who comes near it. As if completing a side quest on my journey, I always stand by the gates and bark back at it purely for the joy of doing so. (You taught me how to bark as part of our puppy play. I remembered the first time I did it shyly on all fours in front of you on your carpet. You tried not to laugh as you told me it sounded like a meow.) I skip across another road to your apartment building’s gate, get past the two annoying gantries and take the lift up. Ring your doorbell. From the inside, you say the door’s already unlocked, but I don’t enter yet—I kick the coloured balls from under your neighbour’s and your shoe racks (the same neighbour who plays the trumpet horrendously and you always complain that they never improved over the few years you lived here) back to the shoe rack of the neighbour who lives on the opposite end of that short corridor, whose child you say threw those balls.
Then, I finally enter your apartment where your aircon is always set to eighteen degrees, inhale the familiar scent of your place that borders on sourness, that clings to me and my clothes. I learn to love the smell, learn to love how I smell like that, like you, even after leaving your place. (I can’t imagine that smell anymore. A few weeks after we broke up, I remembered grieving to my friends over forgetting how you smelled like.) I complain about the hot weather, throw my bag on your red carpet, pour myself a glass of cold water from your pitcher or if I feel up to it, boil some hot water. If I choose the latter, you have to help me get the kettle from the cupboard since I’m not tall enough to reach it and risk it falling on my head (which nearly happens a few times). We sip our drinks—a water for me, a Coke Zero or Red Bull for you—and we talk on the sofa.
Most times, we move to your bed and I strip down to my underwear before getting in because even if my outside clothes don’t bother you, they bother me; and your bed is the comfiest bed I’ve ever laid on. Hiding under the thick duvet from the cold air, I curl up into your side. (You were always warm while I always got cold easily, and you liked it when I placed my cold hands and feet on your skin to warm them up.) …
It felt something close to home for me, and I know you never have and never will feel the same way I did.
I have to pass by your train station whenever I go out, we lived only a few stations apart after all. There was a period of time after we broke up when I always stared wistfully at what I hoped was your apartment building through the grimy windows of the train, wondering if that was even your building. With my eyes, I would follow the road that would take me to your place. Whenever the train arrived at your station, I would always look around on the off-chance I might see you even though I knew you rarely take public transport. I thought it was an achievement when I finally stopped looking out the window for your building or around the carriages for you.
It was apt that I heard you had moved when the train I was on stopped at your station, or at least it was your station to me, even though you didn’t live there anymore. We talked about your plans to move when we were together. You said you were considering moving to my neighbourhood and planning to rent the entire flat. You said I could stay over in the spare bedroom when you moved since I never had a good night's sleep sleeping in your cold bedroom with you. I don’t think you ever knew, and I don’t think I knew fully at that time how the image of the future you had conjured had affected me so—a bedroom of my own I could stay the night at, the idea of home being more concrete, tangible. And I thought you were adorable as I sat on your lap while you showed me apartment listings on your computer, complaining about those that didn’t include pictures of the toilets, since you were picky about them and didn’t like most of the ones in HDB flats.
For a while after we broke up, I fantasised about you moving near me, imagining vividly the shock on your face if we bumped into each other. Perhaps by then you would have become a better person, finally gone to therapy, apologised to me, promised to do better and given our relationship another go. Yet, whenever I told people this (to their disapproval and speechlessness), I always followed by saying it would be easier to win the lottery than for that fantasy to come true. They would laugh along sympathetically to my self-pitying chuckle, relieved I was more clear-headed than my delusions suggested.
That home, in memory, in the past, in my image of an ideal future, remains, then and forever, an inaccessible space. With my months-long break from the kink community, away from your pervasive presence, I thought I had moved on from grieving over that among many other aspects of our relationship, and I actually did for a while. Until recently.
The first and only munch I attended this year was held at the same location as the previous munch I had been to almost half a year ago, by the same organisation with the same munch theme. I was a bundle of nerves over the idea of seeing you again after so long, and wondered if I would be able to have a good time at this munch. I had spent my previous munch holding back tears the entire time because of the hurtful things you had said to me before it, and that was partly the reason why I had stopped attending munches for almost half a year, a significant decision, for someone who used to attend them almost monthly. Once more, I thought the setting was apt—this time, I would be attending with friends at this same location, by the same organisation with the same theme, and I would rewrite that past chapter by genuinely having a good time, instead of burning eyes as I tried not to cry in my cheap coloured contacts while I plastered a sickening smile on my face the entire time that made the muscles in my face ache.
When I saw you, I wasn’t certain if that was even you. It had been almost five months since I last saw you. You shaved your beard. You wore a wig, makeup and a costume. I was wearing my cheap contacts that weren’t in my degree nor corrected my astigmatism like usual. I asked you what you were dressed as and you turned in the opposite direction before I finished my question, completely ignoring me. That was when I knew it was you. Your reaction surprised me. I genuinely thought you had forgotten me—you told me you moved on from me in a week after all, and I was well aware you had no lack of people who wanted to play with you. Or if not, I had thought you would be friendly with me since we ended it on a good note the last time we met each other: We were sitting at the playground opposite the train station and I was returning the implements you lent me. We caught up. When we stood up to leave, I scratched you under your chin like I would do in the past and like usual, you smiled whenever I did that. You asked me if I was happy doing that and I told you I only liked it because you did. You messed my hair up, chuckling at my futile protest and we walked hand in hand to the train station to send me off. At that time, I naively thought we could still be friends. But after seeing your reaction at that munch, I concluded that you might have been angry at me for blocking you on all social media channels unceremoniously since last year. (I unblocked you once last year to wish you a happy birthday right before the day was over after mulling over it for the entirety of that day, only to delete it and block you again right after. I don’t and never will know if you ever saw that message.)
I soon realised how wrong I was, and how generous I’d been with my assumption. Because of the Fetlife status you posted about me that very night of the munch, I realised you had been making multiple Fetlife posts across the year accusing me of things I hadn't done—that I had manipulated others to slander you, that I had backstabbed you for the past few months. (You deleted some of these posts a few days before I posted this writing of mine, but you still left up the status accusing me of backstabbing you that you posted on the night of the munch.) With my hand over my heart, I can sincerely swear I only told the truth as I knew it, and mostly to friends to relieve the pain and seek solace in them, not for my heartbreak to be reduced to gossip, rumours or drama as you declared it to be. In fact, people had shared your previous posts with me before that munch (as I had you blocked) and naively, I told them, as I believed at that time, that you were probably not referring to me. After all, I had been out of the kink scene for a while, only keeping in contact with close friends, much less talking about you to others. At the time, I won’t deny I was quite gleeful to hear that someone else in the scene might have seen through your facade too and was causing you grief. On the day of that munch five months ago, I was sitting in the car with you as we made our way there. My eyes brimming with tears, I tried my best to keep my voice steady and my eyes focused on the back of the driver's seat as I told you that I didn’t agree with your reasons for breaking up, in case you were going to tell others about it. You’d told me that was fine since you don’t tell people about your relationships unless it directly concerns them anyway. I guess it wasn’t fine after all.
I couldn’t sleep the night when I found out it was me you had been posting rabidly about across the year. I was just stunned, unable to even cry. It was only when I met my therapist in the morning to talk about it that I was finally able to cry. My therapist asked me why your actions would hurt and surprise me when I already knew you weren’t a good person. I guess it was because I still thought better of you. But I shouldn't have been surprised, this was your usual tactic—deny and invalidate my words, making me the perpetrator and you the helpless victim. You have created your perfect victim fantasy once more. And the villain? A young woman eleven years younger than you and half your size who left the community for months to heal from you.
I considered making a call-out post with a list of everything you did to me. After we broke up, I wrote a whole document filled with all the things you did and said throughout our relationship so I could read it and remind myself to move on. It would be pretty convenient to turn that document into a post after all. That thought didn’t last long once the anger subsided and only grief remained. If I were to characterise our relationship with an emotion, it would be grief—grief for the relationship, grief for the man I thought I knew, grief that we couldn’t remain friends unless it was at my expense, grief for myself and the numerous aspects of myself that I had lost in our relationship; and now more grief, six months later, over the man who was worse than I’d thought possible with each new piece of information I learned about you. Even writing this sent waves of grief through me—my chest would tighten, I’d be unable to breathe, and I had to stop writing periodically to rest my forehead on the table while my chest heaved heavily. I pondered for a much longer time if I should reach out privately to resolve this issue if I had to continue bumping into you at future events, but I was aware if you had any desire to resolve it privately, you would have already done so. My therapists (yes, plural) and friends also warned me against reaching out to you, as doing so would certainly give you more ammunition and opportunities to hurt me again.
It’s funny that what propelled me to write and post this is not because of the way you treated me, the posts you made falsely accusing me, or whatever concocted story I can only imagine you had invented of me to tell others just like you did with your ex before me, but the lost physicality of that “home”, even if I’m painfully aware that this “home” had only ever existed for me. In fact, I wrote the first few paragraphs reminiscing the route to your place weeks before I heard you moved. I didn't think that snippet would ever see the light of day.
My main reason for writing and posting this: catharsis. I won’t deny there’s a part of me that’s gleeful to imagine your angry reaction to this writing if you ever had the opportunity to read it, that your image and reputation that you cultivated and cared so much about were being threatened. But that’s an extremely small part. I’m acutely and intimately aware of how politics functions in the kink community, as someone who had foolishly experienced it to my own detriment. I know this post will do nothing to change your standing in the community through the toys you own that organisers are dependent on, and I’m not hoping it changes anything anymore. What matters is how I feel posting this—it feels like an unburdening.
I was at a friend’s workshop last month and one of the facilitators asked us to remember the last time we felt safe. For me, it was with you sometime last year. I had woken up in the middle of the night feeling hungry, doing my best not to step on you in the dark I crawled blearily across the bed and tiptoed my way to the kitchen. I looked through your fridge and cabinets. There was nothing I was interested in eating, but you had cold milk. I returned to the bedroom with the saucepan in one hand asking you how to use your electric stove. (The next morning, you told me to imagine how scary it was to wake up to a silhouetted figure standing by your bed with a pan in their hand and we laughed about it.) It took a long time fumbling with the stove and waiting for the milk to be heated, dressed only in your shirt that was so large on me it ended at my thighs. (The next morning, you stood behind me in front of the mirror and flapped about that shirt of yours I was wearing, joking that I looked like a flying squirrel.)
When I finished the warm milk, I crawled back into bed. You were lying on your back and I curled up at your side under the duvet. I must have woken you up again for you put an arm around me and started patting me with a steady rhythm. The warmth in my belly from the milk, the warmth of your body, the warmth of the duvet, the warmth of your embrace and pats, that was the last time I felt safe. I went into little space even though we never had a caregiver-little dynamic. You woke up again and said that you heard sounds and realised it was just me sucking my thumb. I whispered in your ear in my higher childlike tone that happens whenever I’m in little space, asking if it was okay for me to be like that. “Yeah,” you said and fell back asleep. I think I will remember this moment for a long time.
But I will also remember how you raised your voice at me over the phone when I was in Thailand last year, when I was stuck in a cult-like detox programme where I had not had solid food for five days, had to do daily enemas with 1.5 litres of water 5am every morning, and was fed laxatives and oils that made me defecate constantly. My anus had bled badly for days to the point I couldn’t sleep, but everyone around me was forcing me to continue the programme. I cried as I told you what I was going through over the phone in the resort. You simply said, “You’re doing alright.” Annoyed and already distressed from the programme, I said, “Just alright? After what I just told you I’ve been through?” That’s when you raised your voice at me. “I had a stressful week of work and I didn’t come onto this phone call to be harangued about my word choice. This is my only weekend to myself and I don’t mind you calling, but if you’re just going to harangue me, we can end the phone call now.”
As if I hadn’t cried enough, I cried even more and apologised to you over the phone for not understanding your British colloquialisms, not wanting to end the call so abruptly in my time of need. I was already feeling extremely depressed and suicidal because of the programme, and after getting off the call, those feelings were only exacerbated. I somehow survived the programme and when I returned to Singapore, I met up with you. I sought to understand why, every time I sought emotional support from you, I always got the opposite. You told me you felt I didn't need emotional support from you, as if that was a sufficient explanation for the way you treated me over the phone, and on several other occasions. You went on to elaborate that you mirrored what you got and I was always cold to you, so you mirrored the coldness you claimed I treated you with, even though you really liked me a lot. Till then, you’d never been clear about your feelings for me no matter how much I asked, and would even get annoyed with me when I did. (Once, you told me you didn’t want to express you liked or wanted to date me because you felt I was only liking you with the aim that you would like me back, and then I could make a joke out of your feelings.) So, I was foolishly giddy and happy to hear you finally express your affection for me. I had forgotten about my woes, and began to speak about modifying our love languages for each other so we could feel each other’s affection, and we started officially dating. When we broke up and I finally cut off all contact with you, I would sometimes think about being friends with you again, but then I’d remember the things you said to me when I was stuck in the detox programme, the lack of empathy you held, and my naivety.
Holding conflicting memories of you close to my heart has been difficult.
After finding out about the status you wrote about me following the munch, I heard more about the things you did, the lies you told, and what you said about me before and even while we were dating. More grief ensued. When I thought my opinion of you couldn't sink lower, there would be something new to change that soon enough. I guess I had always thought better of you still, regardless of the evidence in front of me. I wondered if my feelings of home and safety were ever real in the first place, since my impression of you was never accurate either. I agonised over this for a long time. But if I negate those feelings, I wouldn't be honouring my past self, who, albeit naive and infatuated, had genuinely felt those feelings, had moments of happiness with you and clung tightly onto these emotions and memories like rare treasures among all the bad times in that relationship. Those feelings were pure and real. They are mine .
All that matters is what I, or my past self, felt at that time. I would be honouring you instead if I denied the existence of my feelings because of who you actually were as a person. Multiple and contradictory truths can co-exist: I found home and safety in you, even though you were and had always been the antithesis of everything home and safety represent. Another therapist pointed out that if I never gave up on trying to communicate and improve things in spite of the constant hurt you caused during our relationship (intentionally or not), then I couldn’t have been as negative and nor could I have been assuming the worst of you, as you’ve always claimed I’ve been. I'm incredibly positive and optimistic to persevere in the face of constant hurt, to believe that my clear communication could get through to you and help us work things out, to see the good in you and continuously hope you would change.
…Whenever I came over to your place and we cuddled and chatted enough in bed, we would play. I was always the one to initiate play—you said you didn't want to ask or initiate play because you didn’t want to assume I was up for it, but I also suspected you enjoyed seeing how embarrassed I got asking for play even though I tried my best to act nonchalant. I would take out the choke chain collar you bought me, the dog tag you customised dangling from it with the acronyms GLB (good little bitch) and HLB (horny little bitch) engraved on opposite sides. (When you first gave me the dog tag, I had gone into subspace immediately even though we were in public at a munch. You had just recovered from COVID-19 and you didn’t want to be physically close to anyone in case you still had remnants of the virus. But you said I looked so cute you had to hug me, and you did.) I would pass it to you wordlessly and nonchalantly for you to put it on, but I always wondered if you knew that was just an act to hide my embarrassment. You would move your table into your room and I would roll up your carpet to make space for play in your small living room. We would usually start the session with foot worship because it got me deep and fast into subspace. (The first time we did it, I was kneeling on the floor while you sat on your leather couch. You had your feet in my lap as I wiped them dry with a towel. You started waving your feet near my face and relished in my disgust as I squirmed away from them even though it was my idea to try it. But just as your foot touched my face, I went into subspace immediately and sucked desperately at your toes. Both of us discovered a new kink that day.)
You would usually end the session with forced and painful orgasms with a wand. You would turn me upside down so that my head rested on your carpet while you held my bottoms in the air so I would squirt on my own face. (Just after we broke up, I read on a group chat that you recently realised you liked pain-gasms. I wish you would have told me that when we were together. But still, I was proud that, as inexperienced as I was, I helped you, experienced as you are, discover more kinks.) At the end of each play session, still in subspace, I would bathe you from head to toe (the first time I did it you exclaimed, “At this rate, I would be the cleanest dom in town!”). When you left the bathroom, I would shower and remember to gargle my mouth with mouthwash. Huddling in your towel, I braced for the cold as I left the bathroom. You would always be sitting in front of your computer and I would sit on your lap shivering from the cold as we kissed deeply. (That was why the mouthwash—the first few times you avoided kissing me. When I asked why, you said you didn’t want to kiss me if I had been sucking your feet or drinking your piss, so I always made sure to gargle with mouthwash.) When we pulled away, you would tell me it was time for “normal Tan Tan” to come back, and I would pout and try to get away. You would wreck your brain to think of something funny or something that I vehemently disagreed with, usually a combination of two, for me to break out of subspace.
After that, it was the most excruciating time for me: I had to pick dinner on Foodpanda. We had realised that my decision paralysis got worse after a session but we continued that routine still. After having your leg cramp up once from me sitting on it for too long, you wisely moved to the sofa when it was time for me to pick dinner and fiddled with your phone. I would get stressed by the fifteen-minute timer the platform provided has to use its discount, and you would hear my agonised complaints about overshooting the time limit again. Then, you would come over and refresh the page, and the timer would start again. Most times, I would eventually pick the same zichar store we always ordered from. After that was over, we could finally laze in bed while waiting. Multiple times, I tried in vain to get your Alexa placed beside your bed to recognise my voice. Because it couldn’t recognise my voice, it frequently played the wrong songs. (Do you remember when we were walking to a munch once and heard music from the chapel next door? Without hesitation, we ballroom danced badly across the street before stopping at the entrance of the munch. The link between Alexa playing the wrong songs and the chapel music is tenuous at best. This was just a self-gratuitous insert of a fond memory with you.) If I wasn’t failing at commanding Alexa to do what I wanted it to, I would be doing random one-man shows on top of you with the duvet as my hood or cape and you as my only audience. (I asked you what you liked about me and some of the things you said you liked were that I was cute, smart, funny, and it was always a fun time with me. It was true, I always made you laugh. I thought it was cute when you told me that when you texted “haha” or “lol”, which you sent frequently in our chat, you were actually laughing in real life and they both meant different kinds of laughter. I’d like to think my performances, among everything else, contributed to the fun times we had.) When dinner arrived, you would sit on the sofa while I sat on the carpet opposite you, our meals on the table between us. (I remembered one time early on in our relationship when you started sing-songing, “Dinner’s here! Dinner’s here!” and threw my clothes and bag that I shoved under your table on me, who was still lying reluctantly on your bed, as you carried the table out. I told friends about that and how adorably goofy you were.)
After dinner, you would drink your wine and I would sip on my piping hot tea, while I curled up next to you. We would talk about the play session earlier, dissecting it from the start till the end. When that was done, we would talk about other things until it was bedtime for you, extremely early for me but late for you because of your early work hours. We would hug and kiss by the door, while you leaned on the doorframe and watched me walk down the short corridor before I disappeared over the corner towards the lift. When I left your building, I would look up at your balcony, trying to spot you somehow, even though I knew your curtains were always closed. I would walk the right side of the path, taking out my phone to send you a goodnight text before you slept. As I trod down the path back to the train station, I replied to messages I had not seen since the afternoon, contented and happy, my clothes, my bag, me, smelling of you.
When I got on the train, my face would spasm in embarrassment involuntarily as I started recalling our play session from earlier on. I would schedule my messages about what I remembered and my embarrassment towards them to be delivered to you the next morning (since you had to have your ringtone on while you slept and I didn’t want my messages to wake you up), already looking forward to your replies enjoying my embarrassment and the next week we would meet. (After we broke up, I read on a group chat that you had dom drops and that surprised me since you never mentioned them the entire time we were together. When I asked you about it, you told me the messages I sent you in the days after playing aggravated your dom drops and that it was my fault you couldn’t tell me because I got easily upset. Then, you told me that if I wanted to get angry and upset at you, I didn’t need to drag you into this sort of conversation to do that. I clarified that I just wanted to have a better picture of our relationship and apologised. That conversation ate at me for a long time.)
There’s no more next week, no more next time. It’s a thin line between reminiscing and yearning, and I must always remember never to turn back because I would only ever see your curtains on your balcony—the defences that you have built around yourself and your insecurities; defences that only hurt others, including yourself too. Regardless, I won’t deny that I will always carry a part of you within me because you changed me, for better and for worse. Regardless, thank you. Regardless, I’m sorry I couldn’t be better for you.
It has been more than six months since we broke up. I don’t know what your intentions are for abruptly deleting those hurtful and untruthful posts after posting a status about me and your ex before me just a few days ago, about how whatever actions you falsely accused us of carrying out showed “how low human depravity could go”. But the fact that your status about me backstabbing you is still on your profile and you had also spread untruths about me by word of mouth continues to make me wary of your intentions. I can’t hope that you finally decided to close the chapter for good anymore, like I naively and painfully thought you did last year when you told me you had moved on from me in a week.
But even if you won’t close this chapter, I will. I will carve my own space in the community independent of you. More than that, I will make my own home someday.