Flan 🍮

The milk is pushing my brain around, and it hurts my skull. I press my middle and forefingers against my temples, and it gets rid of it for a moment. But it slowly leaks into my stomach and starts melting away the lining, so I claw at my waist.

I crave you.

Sugary lips and deep brown eyes. It’s like watching crystals melt in a pot when my mom makes flan. It also smells like you, sweet with a bit of a warm feeling, like cinnamon,

Sometimes, as it caramelizes, I want to go for it. Dip my finger in it quickly so it won’t burn, but it will because the syrupy liquid will cling to the tip, and the heat will go right through the thin tissue.

My stomach growls as I stare blankly into the oven. The flan bobs in the water as air bubbles push themselves out through the edges of the pan below. My ribs, which are left clawing at my skin, can sympathize with their suffocation and need to get out. For all I feel is the aching of my heart and how it's collapsing behind my chest.

As creamy small hands pull on the handle, the oven slaps me with its heat waves. The air in the kitchen thickens with an intoxicating scent, so honeyed and rich, that it fills my nose with the memory of buttery popcorn. It doesn't make sense, but it takes me back to the movie theater, where you left your taste in my mouth with sloppy kisses. To me, you were sweeter than honey, a sweet syrup man could never replicate.

The white plate was smeared with caramel when a thick solid chunk of condensed milk, cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, and eggs, was placed on top. It was drowning in the syrup, much like my heart when it's submerged in a sea of memories that haunt me with a constant current of you, a relentless tide of restless thoughts and feelings that pull me under with their weight. With each wave crashing over me, dragging me deeper into the abyss of longing. When I do reach the shore, I find only the emptiness of your absence.

My mother sprinkles a bit of cinnamon on top of it. Instead of its smell taking up the room in my nostrils, it’s the cologne you wore that night. The moment I saw you, I turned red like a tomato. You wore green and my skin burned and melted onto you, as we coalesced. I clasped your hand and buried my face, thinking I found the one, and you wrapped your arms around me, catching a glimpse of how my face exposed what I was feeling inside.

You stuck to me like syrup on skin. The more I tried to rub you off, the more you spread and embedded yourself onto me.

Now you're replaced by shards of glass slicing my guts, and me vomiting the truth I keep refusing to swallow.

I cut a perfect slice and grabbed a spoon. Placing a piece of the custard in my mouth, smiling, a sickly-sweet facade hiding the bitterness beneath. Couldn't you have gone for my head instead of leaving a gaping hole below my collar bone? I've never been so infatuated that I couldn't put words together. You should've torn me limb from limb, so I could've found the courage within me to form a proper sentence for you. You wouldn't have stayed either way. The love I possess is just that, possessive. It even scared me that I hid and denied exposing myself to you completely. How would you have reacted to seeing me cowering, rotting away like a fetus without a womb, as my decaying body bled out every embarrassing and perverted thought about you?

Again, you wouldn't have stayed, and it's unbearable how I can't control what you caused within me.

*I wrote this piece in high school for a class(creative writing). I was obsessed with flan at the time lol

**The version I wrote for the class was more hopeless romantic? like sweeter or lovey-dovey? cheesy? you know? so the version of it now is more depressing (Yikes!) I know, the cruel reality lol I guess to show how it left me ? I know you can't have one without the other so it's okay b/c its still sweet in a way?

***This has been in my drafts form years (Since 2018) and I'm actually kinda happy its finally gonna "see" the sun :3