The Story

"All of this is true, mostly." - Kurt Vonnegut


The man was ahead of me on the sidewalk, he was tall, fair haired and fit. He stood uneasily, hands dangling at his sides as though he couldn't quite decide what to do with them, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and his head turned as he scanned his surroundings. His eyes were bright and, I decided, more intelligent than I would have expected from someone who wore his t-shirt with the sleeves rolled into themselves.
To his left there rested a bike, spray painted white and chained to a street sign. Seeing this he absentmindedly brought his fingers to his lips, kissing them lightly before tipping it in the direction of the vehicle.
“You knew her?” I asked. The bike was a ghost, in memoriam to a biker struck and killed on that corner some weeks earlier.
“No,” he replied, “but I might as well have.”
“How do you mean?”
“That's a story...”
“I have time.” I grimaced inwardly at my faux pas, “If you do, that is.”
“For this?” he said, glancing at his watch, “Always.”
He stepped out of the center of the path, beckoning me to join him, and knelt somewhat stiffly before the bike memorial. After some moments busying his hands by rearranging the plastic flowers and assorted knick-knacks left by those who had known Michelle Higgins, age nineteen, he began to speak.
“I had a friend. After all this time I can think of no better way to describe him. He was considerate, kind, thoughtful, and far more intelligent than he would ever admit to. He was short, adopted off the streets of Brazil by a couple of tall German Lutherans a world away.” as he spoke he wore a sweet, sad half smile and whatever he was looking at was years away.
“I'm sorry, I've been missing him longer than I knew him, which is a strange thing to realize. I've had a lot of time to think about it.
“Now, I'm very sorry, but what I am about to tell you is a lie. Things never happened in the way that I am going to tell you they did, which makes it about as true as any of the stories that we tell ourselves or each other.
“I met him in a theater. We were working on a musical, Cabaret, and the designer was attacking her set with a sledge hammer, and we were trying to convince her that it was alright, really, or at the very least that it was Preview that night and we didn't have time to build a new set from the ground up. Four days later we were kissing at the cast party.
“It was high school of course, we were guileless and gay. It was practically as inevitable as it was ill-advised. It was in Germany that I broke his heart. Dumped him one drunken night when I could no longer pretend that I loved him the way that he claimed to love me, I believe he was as sincere as it was possible for us to be...
“My heart was given to another (yes, that's the way I thought about it, don't tell me you were less dramatic at that age) someone I had dated earlier in the year, and who had let me go, unceremoniously, over AIM maybe six months earlier.
“Now, my high school theater program was incredibly incestuous. So naturally my two ex's ended up dating each other not long after words, and for the longest time I could only conflate my friend, this beautiful human being with the most base of actions and intentions. He, in turn, was understandably paranoid that I would try to seduce away the... It's problematic relating gay drama in the abstract, the pronouns make everything more difficult, the third party.
“That went on for... months really. Up to the moment that I heard the news. It was a phone call that I will never forget, even if the connection was so bad, and my friends voice so shaky, that I had trouble making out what it was she said to me.
“The rest of the day as well stands out, weirdly clear to me. It was gray and drizzly, and I didn't know where it was that we were all meeting up, a friends house, in Tangletown. It was a house that became my second home over the next months and I had to stop for directions twice.
“We listened to a lot of music, and ate junk food, the twenty of us or so that gathered on and around three massive couches and a piano bench. I still can't listen to Laura by Flogging Molly or that cheesy song by Green Day that they always play at graduations, The Time of Your Life without beginning to tear up.
“We all updated our facebook profiles, to try and spread the word, and we posted memorials on his... We watched as more of them poured in from around the country, as friends and relatives devoted to this sweet, powerful young man wrote their emotions and their remembrances in indelible digital ink.” he's shivering a little, despite the heat of the day.
“That year I grew closer to a few people than I have ever been to anyone, and when we parted ways my heart broke, not like it does with the loss of a lover, not like it did when he died. It fractured, and parts of it went this way and that, two of them are living on the West coast, one's in Canada...
“But you don't care much about that I suppose. You asked if I knew her, and I don't, I just go through life blowing kisses at ghost bikes.”
And then he stood and walked away, crossing against traffic, dodging the cars.