Mouse came to see me last week, on a Saturday, without saying a word beforehand.
He hasn’t gone back to Africa since the last time he returned. Maybe it’s because of his eye. In any case, he’s no longer suited for work in the mines.
It was around one in the morning when he called.
“Sheep, I’m downstairs at your place.”
I threw on a coat, grabbed an umbrella, and hurried down. When the elevator doors opened, I saw him leaning against the wall across from me, a half-smoked cigarette in his mouth. His hair was soaked through. A drop of water slid down carelessly and made him blink in that unnatural way his eye sometimes does.
I walked over and brushed the rain off his clothes. He flicked away the cigarette butt. As he stepped into the elevator, he turned and said, “I took a cab, so I only got caught in a little rain.”
Once we were inside, I handed him a dry towel. He took out his cigarettes and lighter from his pocket and set them on the coffee table, then rubbed at his wet hair.
“What happened?”
“Nothing much. I just figured it’s Saturday. You probably weren’t asleep yet.”
“So you just suddenly decided to come see me?”
He leaned back into the sofa. Something ran down from the corner of his eye—rainwater, maybe, or maybe tears. He didn’t bother wiping it away. Instead, he asked me why I was already pushing thirty and still not dating anyone.
I didn’t really know where to begin. Love is a harder problem than science. Who doesn’t want to come home from work and be free to rest or fool around however they like? Once you’re in a relationship, part of your own time stops belonging entirely to you.
He’d been dumped.
Back when things were good, he had even brought Lin over to see me. Once, dead drunk, he tried to persuade me to get into a relationship too, and then get married.
“I didn’t come here for anything in particular,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “Actually it’s been a lot of days already. I’ve just been holding it together. Strange thing is, all of a sudden, I couldn’t anymore. Heartbreak—you get that, right?”
“Why did you break up?”
“In the adult world, do people break up because of love?”
“She thought you were too poor? Then why did she get with you in the first place?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because she’d never been in a relationship before.”
“What kind of bullshit logic is that?” I got up and pulled two beers from the fridge.
He took one from me, cracked it open, and set it on the table without drinking. Then he muttered to himself for a while. The rough meaning was that he had actually wanted to get married, because he was tired of seeing that look of disappointment on his family’s faces every time. After a pile of rambling, he said that in truth he didn’t really want marriage at all. Life was already hard enough; marriage itself felt bleak.
Still, it seemed obvious that what he really wanted was to use marriage as a way to keep a relationship from falling apart. People in love can break up. Marriage, at least in comparison, feels harder to walk away from. He picked up his phone from the coffee table and showed me the last messages between them.
“Maybe she just wanted to force me to leave this way,” he said. “She knew I had no money.”
“But that’s normal, isn’t it? This isn’t children playing house. If someone’s with you, there still has to be a life to live.”
That mention of children playing house led him to his first love.
“When she talks about me now, it’s nothing but hatred,” he said. “She says back when we were in school, she came to see me once, and I didn’t even walk her home though it was already so dark out. But it’s strange—I only remember the beautiful parts. Like some fairy tale.”
“When people are young, there’s barely any sense of responsibility in love. Everyone is only wrapped up in their own feelings.”
He looked at me. “Then what about you? If love suddenly showed up in your life, do you think you’d handle it well?”
I actually thought about it.
It was the sort of question I had never really imagined being asked. I hadn’t had a proper relationship since college. At one point I had even started to feel like I no longer had the ability to love someone, or at least no willingness to go through the suffering of love again. So when he said they broke up because he had no money, I could understand it, but I couldn’t fully feel it from the inside.
I tossed my empty can toward the trash. It hit the rim, sprang back out, and clattered loudly across the floor. I left it there. When you’re thinking about something else, an abandoned beer can has no priority at all. I could pick it up whenever I wanted, or never bother. Other than making that one sharp noise, it wouldn’t complain, wouldn’t feel hurt, because it would never have to suffer for love.
“If it happened now,” I said, “I’d be fifty percent confident I could do it well. Ten years ago, I would’ve said ninety.”
Mouse stared at me, surprised. He looked as if he wanted to say something and stopped himself, but in the end he asked anyway:
“So you’ve gotten worse instead of better?”
He clearly didn’t mean what I meant. Growing up doesn’t make people less capable of love because they’ve forgotten how. It makes them more sober about the fact that they may never have been able to do it properly to begin with. They become more aware of their own flaws—what they lack in intimacy, their selfishness, carelessness, suspicion, that fierce need to possess.
“Because the love we have when we’re young is immature.”
“But I think young love is the only real love,” he said. “I have a female coworker who compares everything when she dates someone. Even my first love—one of the things she wants now is money. The pure, simple image I had of her took a pretty hard hit.” He smiled bitterly and crushed the beer can in his hand.
“That’s normal too. When people are young, boys are often more self-important, and girls are often more straightforward. Later on, men’s intentions tend to become simpler, while women become more practical. That’s why your memories of her feel like a fairy tale, while your coworker measures and compares everything.”
“Did she ever really love me?”
“Who?”
“The one who left me because I was poor.”
I didn’t know how to answer.
Did she love him? Back when he was in Africa digging for gold, he made several times what I did, and that was when they got together. After his eye was injured last year, the fights between them started happening more and more often. That she doesn’t love him now seems certain. Whether she did before—maybe only he can really know that.
“Mouse,” I said, “there’s no point asking me that. Whatever the answer is, it doesn’t matter as much as you think. The world is fake, maybe—but what you felt was real.”