Second-hand Heartbreak; or Kind of a Liability

When you go to the bus station or the train station or the airport, there’s a woman sitting there always, with frizzy hair and smelly clothes and a broken heart, which would be cliché if it weren‘t so true. She hums to herself and talks to Shelley or Kelly or Tiffany or something, and you look away, embarrassed for her.

In her melodies, which you can’t recognize as any particular song you’ve ever heard, she tells you her story. The story is this:

When she was a girl, she was a Shelley or Kelly or Tiffany, even if now she can’t remember which it was. She was blond and perky and turned guys down like she was sending away those black-clothed men with Bibles that knock on suburban doors. It was miraculous, really, how she stayed way up there above everyone else, and it was even more miraculous that she one day believed a guy named Matt or Mike or Mitch when he told her that he loved her, that he only wanted to be with her, that he wasn’t with anyone else. I’m kind of a liability, she said, meaning that she was a virgin, but he kissed her on the mouth and then in other places, and when she breathed in and out and he was there, it was a miracle. And more miraculous that she opened up her legs for the very first time to him, and he filled her up and emptied her out and filled her up again, and by the time he went away for good, his baby was growing inside her.

He’d been gone two months before the heartbreak got really bad, and her internal organs got all mixed up and her heart started pumping some kind of poison, instead of it staying in the liver where it belonged. To make a sad story short, her heart shot that bile right into her belly, and it found its way through all sorts of membranes to that baby. That baby died, which was just as well, because if it couldn’t survive a little second-hand heartbreak, it had no business being born in the first place.

The baby melted out of her, but she kept on talking to it, calling it Shelley or Kelly or Tiffany or whatever blond and perky and well-liked name she’d thought of that week until, pretty soon, people thought she was crazy just for loving some man who’d said he loved her and for feeling kind of bad about the heartbreak that dissolved the little thing growing in her. But still she sits always, waiting for the bus or the train or the airplane that might bring back the people that she loves, or that at least she thought once loved her. And sometimes, when it’s really noisy in one of those places, she likes the quiet.

It’s always so quiet when the sounds are loudest.

You stop to listen.

When she hums at the bus station or the train station or the airport, this is the story she’s humming.

After that, after that first time you listen, she’s finally told her story to someone; or rather, someone has finally listened to her song. And now, even though you’re stuck in that seat waiting for whoknowswho to come back, she’s gone.