Abandonment Like That Was Easier Then

Tim slips a dollar into the jukebox and puts on James Brown as we scrub and mop, grooving across the soapy tile floors with energy brought on by the prospect of the shift’s end. He counts the tips while I collect the trash and take it out around the corner, where I run into Mary, who I haven’t seen in two years. She’s wearing a matching blazer and skirt that makes her look like a flight attendant, and her haircut is one color now and looks a little more expensive. A plastic I.D. card is clipped to her coat and she’s holding a leather briefcase. I am unshaven, wearing an apron stained with mustard and barbecue sauce, and carrying two trash bags that are dripping an orange liquid.

She explains that she is in town recruiting for her company, and is on her way back to the hotel to change. I explain that I’m still living here and about to get off work, and it’s the first time I can ever remember being ashamed of this job. What scares me is how quickly I am able to shake it off. We make plans for a drink in the hotel bar, and I head back in to finish up the shift change.

I don’t know why we do this to ourselves. So rarely do we sit down with an old lover from a past life and not find ourselves wistful for older times or alarmed at their change in demeanor, appearance, friends, attitude. You aren’t sitting across from them, but rather what they have become, and once one dives into the chaos of this world, the change is rarely for the better.

Her eyes are as green as a fairway, and it seems they might be the only thing that hasn’t changed. She sounds more cynical, less warm; she smokes cigarettes now, and fake laughs at her boring co-workers’ jokes, and she no longer smells like a Blow Pop tastes. The cheap, chunky rings are missing from her fingers, and her shoes look uncomfortable to be in.

“I wish I was still here,” she says with a sigh, and I know she doesn’t mean that. She’s either trying to soften the fact that I’m still pouring drinks in this town, or she’s mistaking ‘here’ for ‘myself’. She probably enjoys drinking wine while she sits on Ikea furniture at parties where there are cheese cubes and no beer pong tables. I stifle the urge to say ‘me, too’.

“You really shouldn’t smoke,” I say, taking a drag from my cigarette.

“It relaxes me,” she says with a weariness that implies a stressful life, despite the fact that she’s spent the last twenty minutes telling me about how her days are compromised of sitting at a desk checking her e-mail, amazed that she’s getting paid eye-popping amounts of money to do so. My mind drifts off to the carefree girl flitting from table to table on a Saturday night, the one who would drunkenly pirouette down the sidewalk in front of me on our way home. I don’t see that girl in front of me anymore.

“You really like how all of the instruments come in one at a time,” she says as The Cure begins to play on the jukebox. She raises her eyebrows as if I’m expected to be impressed by her knowledge of me. At the moment, I kind of am.

“I do,” I say with a nod. She sighs and rests her chin on her palm, gazing at me in a ‘what are we going to do about you?’ sort of way, the kind of look she used to give me right before we kissed. I always felt like a naive child who’d done something so adorably stupid that she couldn’t help but squeal and embrace me.

“You seem sad.”

“Haven’t I always?”

“Not like this.” She traces a manicured finger around the lip of her glass. “How long do you plan to stay here?”

“I don’t know…haven’t really thought about it.”

Her eyes are searching me for something, and I wonder if it’s the same thing I’m searching her for. On the surface, I haven’t changed much – I still have detailed opinions about “Just Like Heaven” and I still live here and work a service job, and I’m pretty sure I’ve worn this shirt back when we were together. But I’m certain that she notices the spirit missing from my eyes. Perhaps while I’m searching her for remnants of her old self, she is conversely searching for any noticeable change in me. I get the feeling that the both of us will be disappointed.

“You know,” she begins, taking a pull from her drink and pursing her lips. “I always thought that you would be the first person I knew here to leave and do something really great. I really did. I can remember looking at you some nights and thinking ‘in ten years, I’m going to be able to tell people that I dated this guy’.”

This may be one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, and yet it makes me feel nauseous. Not only does it contain the pangs of guilt, but it contains the notion that doing something great involves making a lot of money or being famous. It contains the idea that if I never left this town, she wouldn’t find herself proud of the fact that at one time in our lives we shared a connection. It implies that she’s reconsidered her idea of me, and I don’t blame her. I want to explain all of this to her, but I think she’s too far gone for it to make any sense. Or perhaps I am.

Thankfully before I have to respond a co-worker of her’s wearing a pale blue shirt with a white collar approaches, greeting me offhandedly in a manner that feels no different than if he were to pat my head or give me a quarter to go get some candy. He probably sees me as just what I am – an old acquaintance she’s left for bigger and better things. The only thing I’m unsure of is how much bigger or better those things are.

“I told my friends I’d take them out for a night on the town,” she says, her eyes still back in the conversation we were just having. “Would you like to come along?”

“I don’t think so…I’ve got to open tomorrow.”

“Well, it was really good to see you,” she says with the frown of disappointment we all have when we briefly get to visit our pasts. She gives me one more burning glance of desperation, and hugs me tightly. As she catches up to her friends waiting near the entrance, I think of the wide-eyed boy who used to get butterflies when he saw her, the one whose face would beam so wide as she drunkenly pirouetted down the sidewalk in front of him on their way home.