Page 14 of Come Back To Me

His smile didn’t falter; in fact, he looked like he was really considering what I said.

“Is that what you do?” he asked. “Bring the madness?”

I shrugged.

“It’s not an easy thing to get your heart broken. You have to really love someone,” he said.

That was true—if it wasn’t in their possession, they couldn’t break it.

“Have you ever really been in love then?” I asked.

“Puppy love.” He nodded. “The wound is shallow but present.”

I liked that so much I repeated it to myself:shallow but present.

I’d dated a handful of artists—not by choice—it just happened that way. Some of their hearts broke when I chose to move on and leave the state; others were as indifferent as I was. But the ones who did love me were always confused when I told them I was leaving.

“What about me?”they’d say. “Us?”

And then I’d have to explain that we’d always been temporary. I was a gypsy. It wasn’t about them, not my arrival to a place or my leaving of it, but they didn’t understand that. I’d warned them all beforehand, before their feelings got involved, that the minute I landed in one place I was already on my way out. I think they all thought they could make me fall in love with them and stay in one place.

“Don’t you want American citizenship?” a painter from Chicago had asked me.“If you marry me you can stay forever.”

That sent me running sooner rather than later. I didn’t want to stay anywhere forever. The said painter had gone on to paint a series of portraits calledLeaving, which were displayed in various galleries across the US. All of them were of a blonde woman’s back as she walked away from cities across the US. I heard that he received six figures for each of them and eventually opened his own gallery. I never contacted him, I thought it would be tacky, but I was happy for his success.

“So what do you say, Yara? A real date, not some shitty bar.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“Another date, if it goes well. Maybe some hot sex on the beach.”

“There is no beach here.”

“Aha! You’re interested though; otherwise, you would have shut me down.”

The painter had been an older man with a teenage daughter. On weekends we’d pick her up from her mother’s house and take her to the mall where she’d choose expensive sneakers and backpacks, and her father would pay for them, a look of guilt on his face. It’s the same thing I would have done to my father had I known him and had he been willing. When I left, I had just been one of his heartbreaks, not his first. The first was powerful; it changed you. My own had been so devastating, altering the way I looked at men and love. And it wasn’t something that just wore off with time, returning you to your previous state of belief. Once you lost your faith, it was gone.

David walked me home when the bar closed. He didn’t ask to come up and I made no move to invite him.

“I’ll see you, Yara,” he said.

I nodded because I didn’t know what to say. I’d actually enjoyed myself, but wasn’t ready to admit it.

David came to The Jane a few days later, scruff on his face, a baseball cap covering his hair. He was distracted, glancing at his phone every few minutes. I watched him stare out the window and stare at the TV all in the same minute, not committed to either of them. He smiled at me once, while I was carrying a tray of food to a table. The tray rested on my shoulder, the plates clinking softly together with my steps. But I was used to David’s smiles and this one didn’t reach his eyes. I served the dishes, casting a worried glance over my shoulder at him. There was something wrong. I didn’t have time to talk to him during the lunch rush, and when I finally made my way over to where he’d been sitting, he was gone, a twenty dollar bill on the bar and a note written on the back of the check I had given him. He’d written down his number and asked me to go to the art museum with him.

Meet me there tomorrow, it said.I know you have the day off, I asked your manager. 10:00. Let the heart breaking commence.

An art museum, he knew the way to my heart. I crumpled up the receipt and threw it in the trash, but later I fished it out and stuck it in my purse. It seemed significant somehow that this boy was pursuing my company in such a relentless way.I know you have the day off, I asked your manager.

I sighed. I would go. I could try to tell myself that I wouldn’t and that I didn’t care a thing about David Lisey’s attention, but it just wasn’t true. I had daddy issues just like everyone else, and the pursuit of the heart was something that appealed to me. When the people who were supposed to like you didn’t—it made male attention a requirement.

Sometimes I searched for my mother on the internet. I didn’t even know my father’s name to look for him, but my mother had a Facebook page and some of her albums were open to the public. I wouldn’t dare friend request her. I didn’t want her to know I cared. Her profile was set to private, but every so often she changed her profile picture, and I would study it for hours, saving it to my phone and then deleting it. Saving it again. Was it me or her? Why had she decided not to mother me? Did she love me? I’d never know because I’d never ask. That was the thing about pride, it shortsighted our hearts. Her profile pictures were of her alone, smiling—standing in front of some pub or a national landmark. Sometimes she posed with a brown mottled cat that only had one eye. I’d zoom in on that cat and its disfigured eye—wonder what it had that I hadn’t. My mother hated animals—I’d once seen her kick a dog.

“Anything that’s not a human is a rodent,”she’d told me once.“And some humans are rodents too,”she’d added.

At the time I’d wondered if she was talking about me. She often referred to children as parasites. Seeing her embracing an animal, look at it with sincere fondness—I told myself the cat belonged to a neighbor or a friend—that she was only posting it for appearances’ sake—like those people who wore fur and pretended to like animals. But I wasn’t sure. Maybe she’d changed. That hurt worse than her just being the way she was. That she’d become the type of person who hugged cats close to her chest but had never hugged her daughter. I pushed it all away—I was so good at that. Compartmentalizing was the key to success.

I changed my outfit three times the next morning. First, it was a pair of black jeans and a pink sweater, then grey sweatpants and a thermal top. Then I changed again for obvious reasons, back into the pink sweater. Finally, I settled on all black. I was emo, I was goth, I was an assassin of hearts and I didn’t give a fuck about David fucking Lisey. I pulled my hair into a tight severe bun and slashed eyeliner across my lids. My lipstick…there was none, because girls who didn’t wear lipstick didn’t care. That’s what my mum used to say. I put Chapstick on instead of lipstick in case he tried to kiss me.

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