Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak

by Adi Alsaid

In the end, I decided that I didn’t need a big plan. I just needed to see Cal, maybe talk to him openly, see if he felt the same way I did. He had to. The way he’d cleaned up after me after slamming my face into the ground. How well we got along. He called my stupid face magical. That meant something, didn’t it?

  Under normal circumstances I would have stepped far away from someone in a relationship. Especially someone as clearly in love as Cal and Iris were. But these weren’t normal circumstances. They themselves had decided that the love was secondary to timing. In the space they carved out for that sensibility, I could see how feelings for me could sneak in. Even if he didn’t know it yet, there had to be something there, right?

  LU

  Good times last night. Thanks again for the invite.

  CAL

  To party would not have been the same without you.

  LU

  Are you as hungover as I am?

  CAL

  I was, but then I went for a run. It works every time.

  LU

  A run. While hungover.

  You either have incredible mental fortitude or are a way bigger idiot than you make yourself out to be.

  CAL

  Say what you will, but I am now hangover-free. What’s your go-to remedy?

  LU

  Er. I had blood soup today.

  CAL

  Ugh. Sounds offal.

  LU

  Clever. Wasn’t bad, actually. Wouldn’t recommend while hungover, but I’d try it again.

  What are you up to today?

  CAL

  Relishing my non-hangoverness by walking around the city.

  LU

  Coolio. Iris too?

  CAL

  She holds similar views to you about running after a party, so she’s still in bed.

  LU

  Want some company?

  CAL

  Sure!

  The High Line was unsurprisingly busy. After yesterday’s late-night thunderstorm, the sky was a brilliant blue and the heat had been momentarily washed away, leaving a cool breeze in its wake. I was in my favorite gray dress, carrying nothing with me but my phone, keys, and a few five-dollar bills. No notebook, no laptop, not even the earphones I usually jam in as soon as I leave the house. Physically, I was still feeling less than perfect, but mentally and emotionally I was feeling... Okay, still less than perfect. I was still in deep, deep shit, and suddenly on a life path that I had not planned on.

  But I was going to see Cal. And I would get to keep seeing Cal. I took a seat on a long bench that looked out at the water and was near a stretch of food kiosks and coffee stands. To my right, a couple speaking in Spanish were toying around with a selfie stick, laughing tirelessly at their poses and private, whispered jokes. I wished I understood enough Spanish to pick up on some of the details of their conversation, but could only catch the occasional word.

  The foot traffic was constant, tons of people holding iced coffees and popsicles and each other’s hands. I looked around, hoping to see a couple on a date to eavesdrop on, or even a couple breaking up, since last time it hadn’t gone so bad, in the end. I didn’t spot anything like that, but I was content to look out at the parade of humanity passing by in front of me.

  Every now and then my thoughts turned to Cal, and what I should say. Should I have a speech prepared? Should I wait until August 4? Would it be a completely selfish and inconsiderate thing to want him the way I did, to burden him with these feelings I’d developed? Or would I be doing what I’d been told to do by nearly two decades’ worth of art: following my heart, putting love above all else? Would I be doing what Iris could not do for him?

  I didn’t want to think about Iris. She was letting him go. I liked her and admired her and wanted to keep her as my friend. Maybe she would understand. It was love. I turned my attention back to people watching, emptying my thoughts, still feeling a little physically miserable but nevertheless enjoying the sun on my skin and the breeze in my hair and my ass going numb from sitting on the wooden bench too long.

  Cal took a seat even before I had noticed him approaching. Which was awesome because it totally saved me from spotting him and then trying to figure out if I should pretend I hadn’t or if I should hold his gaze the whole time.

  “You look very content for a hungover person,” he said, squinting into the sun. He had an iced coffee in his hand and looked freshly showered, his hair too damp to take on its normally tousled look.

  “I am content,” I said, by way of a greeting. I felt like reaching out to grab his coffee and take a sip, but withheld the intimacy for the time being. “It’s a beautiful day out. I got drunk without someone pile-driving me into the concrete, so—”

  “I think it was more of a suplex last time.”

  “I’m hanging out with you. My worries, however big or small, will be dealt with some other time, by a future version of myself that is more ready to deal with worries because she’s already had this little moment of joy.”

  Cal smiled at me and took a sip of his coffee. “I can tell you’re a writer.” Then he lifted his cup at me like he was offering a sip. I tried to maintain my short-lived reputation for being chill by not knocking it out of his hands as I rushed to grab it.

  “How’s your day going?” I asked when I handed back his drink.

  “It’s good. Again, the run helped. It’s a cool feeling to defeat a hangover. Like a superpower.” He swirled the ice cubes in his coffee, then looked around the park. “I’ve actually been thinking a lot about the...” He trailed off, making a halfhearted motion in the air with his hand. “You know, the breakup.”

  I know people describe all sorts of nonsense things that they think their hearts have done. Backflips, somersaults, lurches, skipped beats. That’s ridiculous. Hearts just beat until they don’t. Contract and expand. Pump blood in and out. Maybe an arrhythmic beat here or there due to a medical condition. But when he said that, I almost understood what they meant. I twirled my hair as nonchalantly as I could manage. “Oh yeah?”

  Cal bit his lip, scooted back on the bench so that he could lean all the way against the backrest. I had noticed he was not the most relaxed sitter, often falling into poor posture. Now he looked at ease. He crossed one leg over the other and set his drink on the bench between us. I could see little indents of teeth marks on the straw, and I thought to myself: He’s a straw biter. That’s a thing you know about him now.

  “Yeah,” he said. “And I feel strangely at peace about it.”

  My heart upped its non-heart-like activities. “Really?”

  “Not, like, thrilled or anything.”

  “Of course not. No one expects that.”

  “Yeah, but not... I don’t know. Not devastated. Zen, almost. Like, I know it’s going to hurt more than this at some point. Probably a lot more. But I had a lot of joy over the last two years with her. And this isn’t the last I see of joy in my life.” He turned to look at me as he said this, holding eye contact with me for far too long for it to not mean something. I smiled at him.

  “No, it’s probably not.”

  “Yeah,” Cal said. He picked up his drink and looked away from me, toward the water. “And it’s weird to come to terms with that. That I’ll have joy again, it just won’t be coming from her. It’ll be from someone else.” For good measure, another glance in my direction. I hadn’t bothered even pretending to look away, so our eyes met again. Now it was my entire body doing un-body-like things. Chills, waves of goose bumps, floating. All the possible hyperbolic descriptions people use. “It’s weird, you know? Thinking like that. But I know it’s true. Here comes another quote for you. ‘Love was not a quantifiable substance. There was always more of it somewhere, and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another.’ That’s from—”

  At that moment, all my questions
flittered away. All my doubts about what I should do, what things could mean, whether he felt the same way. It was clear to me that he did. That we would be each other’s unquantifiable new love. I cut the distance between us, parting my mouth and waiting for the beautiful, inevitable moment when he would part his too and kiss me.

  But it never came.

  Cal pulled away. He stood up. His brow furrowed. He looked like a skittish animal about to bolt across a meadow. “What was that?” he asked.

  My heart went back to doing normal heart things.

  “Lu, what was that?”

  “I thought...” I started. But nothing else came. I couldn’t look at him. I pulled my knees up to my chest and stared at my shoes. The Spanish-speaking couple next to us said something in their beautiful quick tongues, then stood up. A family of four squeezed into the space they’d occupied.

  It felt like several groups of people took a seat, enjoyed themselves, then made way for someone else. The earth rotated several times. Cal and I didn’t say a word. He stood there, clearly not knowing what to do with himself. “Lu,” he said, tenderness in his voice. But not the tenderness I was expecting. Or hoping for.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. I dared to look up at him. He had one hand on the back of his head and was looking up and down the pathway, like he was worried someone had seen, like he didn’t know how to proceed.

  Then his eyes met mine. I didn’t know what to do with that gaze. Whether I should plead or apologize or avert my eyes so that he wouldn’t have to. I didn’t have to second-guess much longer. He walked away, leaving me alone on the bench.

  25

  DARK DAYS

  Dark days were ahead.

  Well, not literally. They were bright, summer days that stretched way too late into the evening and started well before I was ready for sunshine.

  I went to work and came back home, leaving my phone buried in a drawer so that I could stay far away from all the people in my life. Pete and I severed our attached-at-the-hip workplace relationship, and Brad or one of the other managers must have noticed the tension because they stopped scheduling us for the same shifts and the same duties. When we did see each other at work, we didn’t say much. Pete’s jaw was perpetually tensed, like he was trying hard to hold back all the wise, honest, tactless things he wanted to unleash on me. One shift we sat together in the box office, each of us staring resolutely out the window, or down at the books we’d brought with us and kept hidden on our laps.

  At home, I helped Mom cook. I sat with Jase on the couch and asked if I could play a game with him. I did all I could to keep my mind off the topics of love or writing or human relationships or the future or escaping to Kenya.

  It didn’t really work.

  As soon as I let my guard down, my mind attacked itself, entering loops of the same stupid thoughts repeated over and over until I had to go to the bathroom and pretend I was taking cold showers to combat the heat. I barely ate, claiming I’d been tasting so much while cooking with my mom that I’d filled up on spoonfuls of marinara sauce and bites of meatballs.

  For some reason, Mom didn’t call me on this obviously terrible excuse. She smiled and said, “Okay, honey. Thanks for helping.” Every now and then she’d ask me if I was okay, if I wanted to talk, but I didn’t. I wanted to never talk again, since I obviously couldn’t be trusted to understand other people in the slightest. I especially didn’t want to talk to anyone about love, since I was in no way qualified to do that. Honestly, Hafsah should have fired me a long time ago.

  Every now and then in bed I found myself tearing up suddenly, feeling like the world was too much to handle. Or I’d start to tear up because I was just another stupid teen going through another stupid heartbreak. But knowing that didn’t help ease the pain at all. I wasn’t even sure anymore who I was feeling heartbroken about, Cal or Leo or Iris or myself or my writing. Most of the time though, I tried to go numb. That’s all I really wanted. I listened to songs like “What Happens When the Heart Just Stops” by the Swell Season and “To Wish Impossible Things” by The Cure for the comfort of their mopiness, but couldn’t even handle listening to the lyrics, so I tuned them out as best as I could.

  There was also that small matter of figuring out how the hell to tell my parents that I was about to lose my scholarship. A few times I came close to confessing to my mom, when she was looking at me super sympathetically like she’d already guessed everything I’d gone through. But then I’d have to talk about it all. That felt like something Future Lu was better equipped to handle. I decided to wait on that particular disaster when it naturally arrived in the form of a notice email or repo men showing up to take back that NYU sweatshirt I’d bought when I’d gotten accepted, or however it would happen.

  I got one text from Cal, which I never responded to.

  CAL

  I’m sorry I bolted like that. But that really took me by surprise.

  Things between us aren’t like that, Lu. I care about you, but not romantically. I’m not mad or anything. Love is weird and hard. I know. And Iris isn’t mad either. Maybe the three of us should meet up and talk this out?

  I had a few texts from Leo too, most of them classic ex-boyfriend texts like:

  LEO

  You up?

  LEO

  Hey, hows it going

  LEO

  I’ve been thinking about you.

  LEO

  Please answer me Lu. I miss you. I’m sorry.

  LEO

  I’m trying here, but you’re not making it easy.

  About a week and a half after my disastrous decision to unravel my own life and scatter the pieces like an oversize game of Jenga, I was at work taking tickets. It was a Wednesday night, and since I was tearing tickets I had few ways to get my mind off of the tiny, not-at-all-overwhelming mistakes that I had made.

  Pete was working that day, but thankfully he was at concessions behind me. I was trying to keep myself entertained playing one of our people-watching games, I Would Bone That Person. Unfortunately it being a Wednesday night meant there weren’t all that many people coming in, and every time I tried to play out a fantasy with an attractive person who came by, my daydream would turn to me fleeing the country well before it progressed to anywhere sexual.

  So I made up a new game for myself called I Would Be a Completely Normal Human Being around That Person and Not Act like a Total Weirdo. There was one inherent flaw in the game, which was that I didn’t come up with any rules and wasn’t playing with anyone, and so I just thought the name of the game every time a person came to hand me their ticket, and that’s where the game ended. I put my elbows on my little podium and leaned forward, making it tilt as I sighed. Maybe I could count how many popcorn kernels were on the floor. Or how many times the ugly pattern on the bright red carpet repeated itself within my periphery. Or how many scholarship dollars I’d lost.

  Then a wave of panic would creep in, reminding me that I was alone and jobless (well, kinda) and when I’d made a friend who I felt like myself around, I’d proceeded to embarrass myself by projecting my feelings of affection onto him.

  “Girl, you look like you’re a million miles away.”

  I looked up. Starla was standing in front of me.

  “Hey, Starla.” I took her ticket and handed her back the stub. I wanted to follow her into the theater, sit in darkness for two hours while a story took over my mental functions. “No work today?”

  “What’s going on with you?” She tossed the ticket stub into her open purse and then waved her hand around like she was tracing the outline of my body. “You do not look as sprightly as usual.”

  The mere fact that she asked me the question threatened to send me into a tailspin of tears. I wanted to leap into her arms and weep into her tattooed bosom while she shushed me and told me everything would be okay.

  I blinked back my neuroses a
nd tried my best to fake a smile. “I’ll admit I’m not feeling peppy. What are you watching, by the way? I didn’t actually look at your ticket. Don’t tell my boss.”

  “You are not just sidestepping that conversation that easily, girl.” She moved aside to let a group of high school boys come through. When guys my age come through, I usually do a little scan for attractiveness, or at least try to recognize attraction for me in their eyes. This time I just took their tickets and waved them through, not bothering to count how many tickets they’d handed me. “What’s got you upset? Who do I have to beat up? Is it Fart Boy?”

  This time tears did fight through to the surface, and I had to take a deep breath to not let them loose. Starla reached out and put her hand on top of mine, her bracelets cold against my skin. She didn’t break eye contact, her look kind but unrelenting. I looked over my shoulder toward the concessions and caught Pete watching the exchange, an eyebrow raised until he realized I’d caught him and he pretended to be doing something else.

  When I looked back at Starla, I realized how little I knew about her life. We talked about books and bounced one-liners off each other, but I knew nothing about this cool woman I’d been seeing consistently for two years. Other than what she looked like, her place of employment, and her reading tastes, I didn’t know her story at all. I knew she wasn’t married, but I didn’t know what kind of love she had in her life, if at all. I didn’t know the shape of her life outside the bookstore at all, and at the realization that I hadn’t ever bothered to ask, a couple of tears fought through my weakened defenses and trickled down the bridge of my nose. I wiped them away with the back of my hand, then saw Brad walking in my direction, looking down at his clipboard as he crossed the lobby. Starla noticed me eyeing him and she gave a little nod with her head, motioning me away from my duties.

  I called out to Brad and begged off for a fifteen-minute break, which he acquiesced to quickly.

  Starla and I sat on a bench by the bathrooms. “I feel bad. It’s like Pete and I have just been mooching advanced reader copies from you for years and unloading our teenage drama on you without asking you about you.”