Dylan's Chocolate Cake

4:35am. I woke up in Dylan’s bed. Which wasn’t unusual, we had been friends since the age of six. Now at the age of 23, Dylan’s bed had become mine over and over again. The bedroom smelt like hash and incense. A whisper of the sunrise could be seen over the suburbia, I stretched, arms reaching up, up, up, to the ceiling.

Dylan wasn’t asleep next to me, the sheets had never even been turned. That wasn’t usual either, he had a tendency to sleep on his rug after particularly hallucinogenic nights. I remember seeing him last staring at the record player, as though in deep conversation with an old friend, Nick Cave was turning on vinyl…

‘Night Dyl.’

‘Nigh Al, don’t get lost.’

‘Lost where?’

‘Finding the room.’

‘I won’t…See you in the morning.’

No answer.

An ineffable, umbilicus of mess spun itself out of his brain while the record spun and the clock on the wall ticked and the embers from his cigarette soaked his soft face.

I went to bed

The morning was cold, and so was the house, I could see my breath and goosebumps were growing on my legs. I tied my long, messy, water-falling brown hair into a lazy knot and tip-toed into the hallway.

The hallway was riddled with objects, a stringless guitar, dirty clothing strewn across the floorboards, dozens of CD cases, with their discs strewn across the floor. Like some obscure patchwork of art and junk…I thought about cleaning it up but a conversation from the night before struck me…

We were in the kitchen making chocolate cake, there was nothing in it, we just craved childhood so chocolate cake it was. It was a messy affair, there was batter in my hair and an egg smashed on the floor…Dylan’s black curly hair was electric with flour and sugar, he was electric, alive with the excitement of being here, making a chocolate cake with me. He was possessed by intense life, he had been since he was a boy. That was my favourite look, you could almost taste how much he wanted to live a life full of feeling. With a joint in one hand and the whisk in the other, I could tell he was about to get poetic…

‘Alice, I always thought that I was playing the addict…It was all a show, a fake identity…but one day I was high on my rug and I realised…’ He took a puff, ‘I realised it was playing me, I was pretending to be sober, and my addiction was playing me…’ He blew out, ‘So now there’s no point.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we have both figured each other out, my addiction and me.’

I listened to his words, ‘Nanda Devi, a magical mountain...’, they swamped my ears like silk…why could his voice not be my voice?

‘…Alice we could drink the liquid of the gods and stabilise this shifting earth…’

surrounded by his white noise, what he said made no sense, his words, they meant nothing but everything and therefore just nothing.

My tongue felt heavy.

Behind all of his complexities; he was a relatively simple human; he loved drugs, music, and me. Dylan and I had always had a ‘kind of’ love, a cup of tea would have been taken over our love because we both knew that it would always be there, our love. I never saw him as forever but I saw him as life. But sometimes I think I was just collateral to him, I was like the sex he needed to understand what Jim Morrison, Kurt and Cohen were singing about…I guess we all have an ‘almost’,

and he will forever be mine, because there he was, lying on his rug in front of the record player, eyes wide open…

He wanted to feel everything that life had to offer, even the last parts of life, he wanted to feel death in its miraculous process, he wanted to feel everything. But he felt it too much, and fought for the feeling too heavily; because he was lying on the floor, no rise and fall of his chest, no blink in his eye, vomit dried to the side of his face; death wasn’t beautiful, I realised. Lana del Rey had lied, there was no glamour in living fast and dying young, because the way the white colour of his skin mingled with the cigarette ash that created a garnishing halo around his head…he was a sick Jesus reincarnate in death. I looked out of the window, dawn was still whispering…

I couched beside him, my knees touching my ears, a feeble ‘Dyl’ escaped my pursed lips. I knew there was no point in screaming, or shaking him, or crying over his body; he was further away from this earth than any drug had ever taken him. He was with his idols now, but he would never be remembered with them; that’s oblivion, see.

I just felt sad that his soul had glitched its way out of the world and I wasn’t there to hold him. The record was still spinning. Not playing a song, it had exhausted all of those…just a static whisper.

I stood, my knees stiff from the cold, and walked to the kitchen, somewhere in the depths of my brain, the neutrons and protons were screaming at me to find the telephone…and call somebody…My world became saturated with unreality, he was my rock and now my whole life balanced insecurely on a faeries wing. A moth’s breath could have done it. I guess that is how he felt too, maybe, before.

The kitchen was in the same state as the hallway…flour was snow across the bench tops, peppering the tablecloth and the pans on the stove… Somehow amidst the out-of-mind chaos and the deep poetics, on of us had remembered to turn the oven off. I looked out the window, the sky was really blushing with a new day now…I needed to find the phone…

I made flour footprints on the cold floorboards as I shuffled around the room looking for the telephone. I imagined that my toes were turning blue from the cold, and I knew that Dylan would have known exactly what to feel if he were me…There it was, next to our chocolate cake, which was resting peacefully on the sideboard, iced and perfectly round;

waiting.

I realised that life changed now, and it was just me, a dead boy, and a chocolate cake, in an empty house. With all of this in mind,

I called the ambulance and then my mum…and sat on a sticky wicker chair at the kitchen table,

and cut myself a piece of Dylan’s chocolate cake.