Damaged Goods

"So do you love her?"

What throws me is how some of them smile as they frisk you with the question. Maybe because naive people like to pretend they're cynical a lot of the time. That they can peg pretty much every human being as either an underdog or a whore, as if those were the only categories anybody can fall into.

After I put my head down and tongue the inside of my cheek what I'm really doing is trying to work out if damaged-goods-hearts maybe have that same magic vending machine candy has. Candy tastes better when it falls. More flavor. Achieving maximum flavor potential; ask anybody whose tried it.

Thing is, if you fall for somebody sometimes the effect it produces actually deactivates everything the person you fell for feels for you. No tag-backs. Maybe the most rotten bit of luck out there is when the ugliest thing about you is what you look like loving somebody. Other times, it's best thing you got going on. Maybe she's the best thing people like about you.

"What the fuck, Brin? You have to think about it?"

I close my eyes and Union Square pops up on split-screen. I'm fishing out my own "linger yet a while, thou art so fair"-moment with her. Reinfecting myself with the same dread I had fumbling and scrambling around for a ticket I couldn't locate just to get on the subway. She's staring at me through the gate; she's on the other side waiting for me. She walks over to the fence and rattles the bars at me while I go through all my pockets again but I can't find the fucking ticket. She's late for work on Madison Avenue and I'm late for my first day on the job in Brooklyn. It's a mosh pit of morning commute cluster fuck. Please God, give me my fucking ticket. Why have you forsaken me with no damned change in my pocket. Don't you know the kind of fuse this girl has?

"C'mon!" She says. "I can't be late again."

I know that but some asshole bumps into me and nearly knocks me over and when I stand up straight everything slows down and I stop looking for my ticket and stare at her. She's dressed up to work in an office just below Central Park while I'm dressed up to smash reinforced concrete.

This voice, the one Steinbeck I think called the "low voice" starts talking in my head and it's the only thing I can hear:

"Sara, if you leave. If you leave me here---like *this*---this vulnerable, make sure you know we'll never see each other again."

Then I said to her, "Just go. I'll find it. I know you gotta go."

But that "low voice" confiscated Yankee Stadium's PA system and said,

"Look at my face right now, because if you *don't* go and you stay and you help me out of this right now, then I'm with you. And you could be gang raped by the Detroit Pistons in a hot air balloon over the Tour de France and it won't define you and I'll still be with you. Nothing bad you could ever do or anything bad that could befall you (even that colorful previous example I cited) will ever define you after THIS act of kindness right now. It might seem a trivial context or an insignificant gesture---it's not. This is a supreme kindness."

She didn't say or do anything for a few seconds.

Then she came around the gate and helped me find the ticket and then find the train and then kissed me before I headed down the stairs. I turned around and caught her turning around and ever since I've been a human-bullseye for this girl.

* * *

"Are you *in* love with her?"

So I smile and shrug like I always do.