Starman Falling

“I’m so sorry,” I’m saying again. Sobbing. I make sure I look ugly and borderline hysterical,
because maybe he’ll understand just how terrible I feel. I need him to understand, because if he realizes this is what I honestly want, he’ll be mad at me. My head swirls at the mere thought. He's never going to forgive me.

“For what?” he sputters. He’s incredulous.

I don’t want to be the one to say it. I hate the position I’m in, how I’m the bad guy by
default. I don’t want to be the bad guy.

“You know,” I prod.

“No,” his cadence is taut, millions of unsaid words balancing on its high wire. “I don’t.
What are you talking about?”

My stomach is flipping, my throat squeezing.

He knows, I’m sure he does. He just doesn’t want to know. He’s daring me to say
anything else.

A loud sniff slices the stiff air in two as I attempt to melt into his passenger seat. I can’t
stop hiding in my hands. Hiding from him, hiding from myself, hiding from my humiliating performance. I can clearly see myself taking it all back, begging him for his forgiveness, and
suffering through months of forced pleasure if it makes him smile like before.

But it’s like I’m stepping outside of my own body. Someone else is saying it, someone
other than his bubbly, bright, smiling girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. I brace myself, my heart
determined to shatter my ribcage.

Somewhere, a bell tower tolls ten. Its chimes roll across campus, diluted beneath his
favorite playlist that whispers on the radio. The song and the bells clash horribly, flooding the car with teeth-grating dissonance. It’s ugly and uncomfortable and my heart picks up its desperate pace.

“I have to break up with you,” I spew like a child. The wording is important; the
calculating demon inside of me chooses them intentionally. Not “I want to break up with you.”
Not “I think we should break up.” Not “I’m breaking up with you.” I have to. He must
understand that anything else – the forces of the universe, God, Santa Clause – is making me do this without my consent.

/There’s a Starman waiting in the sky.../

Bowie’s voice mocks us on his stereo, warbled in my delirium. Our song. My stomach
dips. I called him my Starman once because I thought no one so wonderful could come from
Earth. I wish he would turn it off.

I’m grateful for the darkness. I don’t have to see the all-consuming expression of loathing that I’m sure is morphing his face right now. It’s not like I can look at him anyway. The urge to run, to escape, to scramble through the window and crawl away on all fours is so alluring that I poise my hand on the door handle.

Instead, I train my eyes on the poorly taxidermized polar bear that is mercilessly squished
between one of the windows of the science museum. We have a perfect view of the pitiful thing from the parking lot, so shriveled and under-stuffed that it could easily function as a living room rug. I’m looking to him for help, for some semblance of guidance as if he’s some intricately carved crucifix hanging inside a cathedral. But the polar bear is silent, offering surprisingly little advice, even for an inanimate object. I must see this through myself.

/He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds.../

“What? Why? What are you saying?” His voice is muggy and oddly echoic in my reeling
mind. It’s cruel, the way he makes me tell him again. But I do it anyway, if only to prove to
myself that this is really happening. Understandably, he is even less pleased. He’s seething.

/There’s a Starman waiting in the sky.../

“Why?” Every phoneme is sharp and strikes my heart at every angle. I can’t do this. I
can’t do this. I can’t do this. He’s so mad. “I thought you said we could make this work! Why
are you saying this?” He absentmindedly twists the bracelet I gave him around his pointer finger. It matches the one I wear on my right wrist.

I want to take it back, I need to, and the words “never mind” almost form on my lips. I
think of how he kissed me on the beach and made me brownies, how he holds my hand when he drives. “Never mind” is so completely seductive, it almost dulls the pain that has been stabbing my heart for the past three weeks. Almost.

/He told us not to blow it.../

I’m a rambling, bumbling fool, barfing fragments of the eloquent, English-major-worthy-
speech I had been planning for days. But the pieces don’t really fit together. His hand is
clutching his lips that had kissed me only minutes before as I’m forcing him to empathize with
the pain of a long-distance relationship. Somehow, though, he can’t see the images I paint for
him: how his sweatshirt became the tissue that would absorb my tears as I cried myself to sleep every night. How every moment I spend with him is tainted with the agonizing inevitability of saying goodbye over and over again. He told me once that he would do anything to make me happy, and I’m vaguely wondering how serious he was; if he only wants me happy if it makes him happy too.

/’Cause he knows it’s all worthwhile, he told me.../

We talk in a circle; a maddening, brainwashing circle.

“Is there someone else?”

“No.”

/Let the children lose it.../

“Did you lose feelings for me?”

“No.”

/Let the children use it.../

“So, you still love me?”

“Yes.”

“Then why can’t we be together? I don’t understand.”

/Let all the children boogie.../

I explain it all over again, each attempt more disappointing than the last. We’re at a
depressing stalemate that festers in an uncomfortable silence. Silence has never been
uncomfortable with him before. The guitar solo that follows loops and laughs at us as we stare at the polar bear, so still and ugly and silent.

Without a word, he shoves the bracelet into my hands, and then there’s nothing left to
say. I’m tapped out of I’m sorry’s, and he’s asked “why” so much that he’ll never have to ask it
again. I’ve acted very few times in my life, but I know the cue that comes next.

The cue before curtain call.

I leave his car silently as Starman continues to infect my mind. I attempt to ignore the
strange sensation of freedom that suddenly washes over me. Perhaps it’s adrenaline, or perhaps it’s something that cruelly resembles awe. When I look up, the night sky is cloaked with a thick blanket of clouds. There’s not a single star in sight, and I smile a little.