And not just gone from my bed. Gone from the hotel. He doesn’t turn up for the last few interviews. I have to do them myself. He eventually does answer my frantic texts with a curt note saying that he’s fine, that he had to leave unexpectedly and I should finish up the project alone. Taliesin is gone.
Oh, there’s a certain amount of brief, professional correspondence as we wrap up our project. I feel crazy. How can Taliesin ditch me? The emphasis in that question changes as I spiral through anger and disbelief and sadness. How can TALIESIN ditch me? How can Taliesin DITCH me? How can Taliesin ditch ME?
He can, and he has.
I think about opening up an online dating profile and decide against it. I’m too destroyed to offer anything to anyone. I feel like I’ve been through a break up without going through a break up. Taliesin was never my partner. If I imagined that he could be, it was just that, imagination. All those conversations, all those plans... does he even remember them? Did they mean anything to him?
One night at 3:03 am, I delete his contact information from my phone. If he wants to be a stranger, let him be a stranger.
I throw myself into other things. My piano skills are the strongest they’ve ever been, thanks to all the hours of practice I do. I join a gym and try not to think about fat guys. Bicep curls, bilateral raises, burpees: the only way to keep from thinking is to be too physically exhausted to move. Some of my own softness melts away. Not all, but some.
Eventually I stop crying every day. Now it’s only every other day.
I’m an adult. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that time heals all heartbreak. I just need to be patient.
The conference where I first met Tal is coming up, for the first time since 2019. I’m nervous. I know he’ll be there. We are inextricably linked by the fields we love. A line from an Ani Difranco song runs through my head endlessly.
I don’t look forward to seeing you again. You’ll look like a photograph of yourself, taken from far far away, and I won’t know what to do, I and I won’t know what to say, except **** you, and your untouchable face...
Then I am there in the conference room, and Tal is across the room. Just as fat as the last time I saw him. No fatter. I can’t help looking at him at every moment when my attention isn’t on a speaker. He draws my eyes like a magnet draws iron filings.
We speak cordially in passing.
In my hotel room, I let hot tears fall as I sob. Tal is gone.
More months pass. I try to remind myself of all the things I disliked about him. He talks too much about himself. He has shitty taste in music. He clicks his jaw in an annoying way. He worries too much about what other people think of him.
The wound is healing, I think. Maybe. I’m alive, and while there’s life, there’s hope, right?
Right?
I don’t know what I am hoping for.
Then, one Sunday evening my phone dings. It’s a text from a number that’s not in my contacts. No name attached. All it says is three characters, three digits.
286.