We once drank starlight from fluted champaign glasses, on a balcony overlooking the lives of ten million people. We poured love into each other’s ears and let the sheets pool onto the floor as the streetlights threw shadows over bare skin. We drank black coffee at midnight and ate toast over the Sunday crossword, laughing when we could only fill in a third of the squares. I wrote poetry on his palm in purple ink so he could put me in his pocket when his hands got cold on the corner waiting for the bus. He felt like forever until the morning I clearly heard him say, “I wish you would just shut the fuck up so I can tell you goodbye.”
“What did you say?” I asked, shocked because just last night he had told me how you loved the way I could tell a story.
“I didn’t say anything, but I do need to get going to the bus stop.”
“Elliot, you just told me to shut the fuck up. I heard you.”
Elliot turned an early sunset shade of pink and stammered, “I, I, I don’t think I did. I do have to get to the bus though.”
It wasn’t long before I was sleeping alone on perfectly placed sheets and throwing the crossword in the recycling bin untried. Elliot had told me goodbye a few days later. The forever kind, not the off to the bus stop kind. I suppose I should have told him at some point over the eight months we were together that I can hear other people’s wishes, but it just hadn’t come up. I had honestly thought he might be the only man in the city who never wished for anything. It had been such a relief just to sit with him and not hear a constant stream of things he could never have – a better job, a woman with bigger boobs, a catamaran in the Bahamas. It hurt like hell when the first thing he wished for was for me to shut up.
I gave myself a week to stream whole seasons of heartbreak and to sleep wrapped in the dress shirts he had left behind, inhaling what I knew was detergent but pretending it was him. I knew I was healing when I picked up a romance novel and lost myself in the steam. I went back to work the next day and only cried a little when I heard the girl at the next desk say, “I wish my husband would stop wanting to cuddle all the time. I just need some space.”
Oh the wishes of the married and secure who didn’t remember what it was like to reach over in the middle of the night and feel nothing but a cold spot and a sense of something missing. Oh how I wished I could accept that cuddling in her place.
As I left work for the day I couldn’t resist stopping at her desk and saying, “Enjoy it while you have it, sister. It could all be gone tomorrow.”
That might be why everyone at my company avoided me at the Christmas party and the annual picnic, but since I was the only one who knew how to fix our archaic computer system, they had to at least pretend to be nice to me at work.
I sometimes wish I could bottle all of these wishes and put them on a shelf in my apartment. Admire the different colors and smells of each one. Watch them swirl behind the glass and know that almost none of them will ever come true. I would especially like to capture the wishes of unrequited love. They are so loud and desperate and there are so, so many of them falling from the rooftops of skyscrapers, that I would like to quiet them with a stopper and never let them out into the world again. There are so few unique wishes. It’s almost always for love or to save a dying family member, which is really the same thing in the end. Yet they are all so earnest in their vibrations, they all are so badly desired that I once tried to make one come true, just to see what would happen.
I was on the corner of 54th and Franklin on a hell of a summer day, checking my phone for messages from Elliot when I heard it as if it had circled directly into my cochlea. “I wish I had the nerve to tell him that I want to be more than friends.”
I looked to my left and saw a young girl in a pretty strawberry dress gazing adoringly at the small, somewhat nerdy boy next to her. The wish weighed so much that I instinctively felt the need to set it down. I walked over to the pair and announced to the young man that the girl would really like to be more than friends. The girl’s eyes widened in horror and her mouth fell open and flapped around like a plastic bag caught in a tree in January.
The boy only kept pushing buttons on the game he was playing and said, “Yeah, I know. But I just want things to stay the way they are.”
The girl had run off in tears and I had vowed to never get involved with the business of fulfilling wishes again. Well, if you don’t count Elliot and the fact that I did shut the fuck up and allow him to say goodbye. Sometimes it happens accidentally, but it’s not like I have much control over that. I’ve also learned that much like my coworker who would probably feel neglected if her husband actually stopped wanting to cuddle, most people don’t actually want their wishes fulfilled and they feel a sense of guilt when they do get what they want. Well, again, except Elliot who hasn’t bothered to text me or even ask for his dress shirts back, which is a good thing since I took them to Goodwill with a wish that they would find a good home.
I was tired of my silent apartment and drinking wine by myself on a balcony meant for two, so I did something I never do – I went to a bar. I avoid bars because the wishes of drunks are generally sex or sports related. Although there is often the one really sad drunk who either wishes his wife hadn’t left him or that he was a better dad to his grown kids. It breaks my heart either way that life only moves in one direction and we can’t undo all the stupid decisions our younger selves made for us.
The bar wasn’t too crowded on this Wednesday night and the normal sound of the basketball game on the giant screen TV had been replaced by Lizzo reminding me that I’m a bad bitch who doesn’t need a man. I slid onto a stool and remembered how Lizzo had been Elliot’s favorite for about two months the summer before. I ordered a drink and slid into a memory of how it felt to drink with someone else when you knew that later the empty glasses will sit together on the nightstand while the alcohol lets you whisper your wishes into the hollow of your lover’s collarbone. How I wished that I could channel my inner Lizzo, forget about Elliot, and just take someone home and let the liquor do it’s thing.
“I’m sorry you were hurt,” said a voice two stools down.
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked.
“Elliot. I’m sorry he left you.”
I stared at the man with the kind eyes while the night stretched like old leather and I knew then how naked the girl in the strawberry dress had felt when I had exposed her.
“I didn’t mention anything about any Elliot.”
“Oh, really? I’m sorry. I must have the wrong person. It must have been someone else in here on the phone. I’m so sorry. Just ignore me. Too many drinks in already,” the man said with a gentle smile and a tilt of his lowball.
Could it be true? Could there be another person like me? It couldn’t be a coincidence. It just couldn’t be. So I tried again.
“I wish that someone else could hear the wishes that fill the air like gnats on a summer night,” I whispered in my head.
I looked at the man. He looked up at me with a slow look of surprise and I caught the slight slur in his silent reply, “I wish that someone would take this weight off of my lungs because they can’t handle even one more day breathing in wishes in this city of so many lonely people.”
I slid off my stool and sat down next to him.
“I’m Mia,” I said, “and I would love to carry some of that weight so that you can breathe a little easier.”
“I’m Arman and while I don’t know you that well yet, I think that Elliot must have been a damned fool.”
Just then the door banged open and a young woman huffed into the bar, sat down heavily in a booth, and I knew that we both heard just what kind of a day she had just had.
“I wish he would get hit by the 8:00 bus! I wish he would fall off the edge of earth and asphyxiate in space! I wish he would be clawed to death by a million tiny crawfish!”
“Here’s to heartbreak, Arman,” I said with a tilt of my Malbec.
He clinked his glass to mine, “And to the gift of unfulfilled wishes.”