“Have a good one,” he says, and then he walks away without meeting my eyes, but that could be because I’m looking at everything--everyone--but him. He slips away, out of my field of view, and it feels strange, unfinished somehow. It’s not until I’ve helped another three or four people that I realize why. there was no sadness in his leaving, no longing. No lingering. No goodbye. And the last time I heard his voice, I was near tears, biting my lip, trying not to make things harder on us both.
“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” he says, and I have to say no. Because what else is there to say? Yes. Yes, that was hard. Harder than anything I’ve had to do in my life. Hard enough to make me feel like my lungs have stopped working and my heart is beating maybe half as much as it should be. I feel like I have more to say, like he deserves a better explanation, but he doesn’t seem to need one. Or maybe he just wants me gone.
“Goodbye,” I say, because there isn’t anything else.
“Goodbye,” he says, and that’s all. I leave his bedroom alone for the first time, holding back tears as I wave goodbye to his mother in the kitchen and, as politely as possible, declining the ride home his father offers me. The walk home is filled with fragmented song lyrics that once belonged to us, and the next time I hear his voice
is when he is wishing me to “have a good one.”
And I have to think, Is this what we’ve come to? Because even at our worst moments, even in the awkward days when he was the boyfriend of my friend and all I knew was his name, we always said more than that.
I wonder as I fumble through my next orders with shaking hands and a stuttering voice whether he’ll be in my dreams again. I never used to dream at all, and now that I’ve begun having visions in my sleep again, he’s the one recurring character. He hands me sheets of numbers that don’t make sense, and he tells me empty things that drip with the flavor of the past, and I wake up confused until I remember that the shape of those words is only a residue in my head, and that they are sitting comfortably in someone else’s now.
A few days ago, a friend of mine was recounting a conversation she’d had with someone else, and she mentioned considering herself as damaged goods. As I walk away from here, the brief encounter with him now an hour--maybe even more--in my past and my brain unable to stop playing it in an endless, painful loop, I wonder if that’s what I am now.
Damaged goods, ruined by the side-effect flavor of mistakes and regrets, and things I might wish, someday, had turned out differently.
