They say that cake solves everything, right? If tyrants and world leaders could just sit down and eat cake together, the possibilities could be endless. Well, maybe.

It came to be that the simple act of wanting, and failing, to bake a cake recently laid bare how my life has taken a stark decline in the space of a few short months. How I’ve gone from having everything I dreamed of to having almost nothing (of course, I must stress that my use of the word “nothing” is strictly from a first world perspective).

I’m currently lying in bed with an arm across my chest. It’s not my arm — I’ve not regressed into sleeping like a vampire just yet. This arm is somebody else’s, but I don’t particularly want it to be there.

As I listen to the shoop shoop of her sleeping breath, I turn away and face in the general direction of your apartment and my mind begins to wander as I think about you and contemplate my future: The stark reality of a world without you in it.

I wonder if you’re doing the same as me. Not the thinking part. The random arm stuff… No, it’s probably something much worse. The stuff I try to erase from my thoughts. It’s too much to bear.
After lying here for hours, thinking and typing this into my phone, she wakes.

“Why are you crying?” she asks.

I respond that it’s just a bad dream. But it’s a lie. In reality, this isn’t a bad dream; it’s a living nightmare that consumes every second of my days and every minute of my restless, sleep-deprived nights.

My response is believable enough for her to fall back to sleep, and I continue to decide how I best pick up the pieces of my life. The issue I that the wreckage is catastrophic and I feel like there are thousands of tiny pieces that I need to somehow find and reassemble.

Staying so close and having nightmares about what you’re doing is not good for me. Moving the best part of 2000 miles away might not stop the nightmares, but the distance will mean that it’s physically impossible to actually contemplate doing anything about them.

As I try to fall asleep, I think back to the cake tin debacle from last week and I wonder… If I baked a cake and we sat down and ate it, would it make things seem clearer? Could we be cordial over cake? Will the simple act of baking a cake help me to find and reassemble the pieces that I so desperately need? More importantly, will the act of baking you a cake help me to sleep at night?

There’s only one thing in the world that I love more than cake…