I Fall to Pieces

Continued from this story.

Every so often, about once a year, the boy would break the girl's heart, and each time it would happen, she'd be surprised. Sometimes, he knew he was doing it, and he did it anyway, did it deliberately, even, and months would pass and then, on the day that she'd decide to give up on him, he would slay a dragon for her, and the pieces would stitch themselves back together, like a crazy patchwork quilt.

Forget about him, others would say every time it happened, he's no good for you. But they didn't know how good he was to her, how he could be exciting and unpredictable, how charming he was; how entertaining, and how generous, if not magnanimous.

She loved to listen to him talk. She loved his voice, just the sound of it, no matter what he was saying. He would tell her stories about his travels, and he would mimic voices, perform sound effects, even sing, and sometimes, in an unguarded moment, or emboldened by alcohol, he would say something that he had meant, but hadn't meant to say, and the loosely stitched pieces would fuse together again. She had learned, though, to pretend she hadn't heard; to make no reference to the things he had said, because he'd forget that he'd said them. He'd deny that he'd said them.

Am I a good man? he would ask her, and she would reply, you are good to me, and most of the time, it was true. She understood how very desperately he wanted to be loved, but only by strangers in bars, and dogs, and little children, because that was safe; because they could never betray him.

So she would come to his beautiful city by the bay, and he would show her things: the bar where a famous writer used to drink; the best pizza by the slice; the world-famous art and jewelry store on Post Street whence had come her extravagant and absolutely perfect Christmas present; a quirky café in his neighbourhood with a canoe and a sled on the wall; an old Jewish man named Phil, who cleaned his shirts and gave her a lint brush. She's a handful, he would tell others, and they would laugh, and then he would spoil it by saying, but she's not my girlfriend, not so that they would know, but so that she would be reminded, and then later he would hold her so tightly that the breath was pushed out of her but she didn't mind not breathing, not one little bit, if he would hold her like that forever and never let her go. But he always let her go.

She knew that he knew that she loved him, and he knew that she loved him, but it was never enough; it could never be enough, because the other thing he knew, just as surely as he believed that the sun would rise tomorrow, was that one day she would betray him. It did not matter to him that years worth of days had passed and that she had not done so, because tomorrow could easily be the day, and he was convinced that the day that he stopped believing that, would be the day it would happen.

She, for her part, could not allow herself to believe that he would not one day abandon her, even though he had said (though not promised) that he would not, even though he was almost always there for her when she needed him (though she tried not to need him), because as soon as she'd let herself begin to believe, something would happen, something like what happened yesterday, when she saw the pictures in his apartment, the pictures she tried first to ignore, then to forget, and she'd thought she was managing, because she had managed not to cry (she hated to cry, and she hated even more to have him see her cry), not then, at least; not until much later; so when he'd asked, have you got it?, meaning the enormous television set that he was giving her, meaning had she got her end of it, and could she lift it, and she said yes, got it, and she thought she had, but she hadn't, and she dropped it, and she told herself it was because her hands were sweaty, not because they were standing right in front of the pictures, because surely he hadn't done that intentionally; hadn't placed the television on the floor right in front of the pictures so that she couldn't possibly miss them.

So she let him believe that the reason she hardly spoke on the long drive to her place was that the woman who had hired her had died suddenly of cancer, and that this had affected her greatly (which it had, it's just that that wasn't what she was thinking about in the car; what she was thinking about was that face in the picture, and how to erase it from her memory), and when she told him that the funeral was on Monday, he had offered to escort her, but then when she told him what time it was he realized that he wouldn't be able to make it, and that was fine, really, because she knew that he had meant the offer sincerely and that if he could have arranged his schedule he would have, and that his work comes first, of course it does, and that none of this means that he is abandoning her, she tells herself; there's nothing for her to fear.

But you see, Gentle Reader, the thing we fear the most is the thing that has already happened to us.

The girl found out later that the pictures were not what she had thought they were, but they are what they are, and they still are, but none of that matters anymore because of this.