An Omniscient Narrator Steps Out of Third-Person Perspective in a Hypothetical Attempt to Console a Character Whose Girlfriend of Over Six Years, with Whom He Has Gone Through Profound Life Experiences and Against Whom He Will Measure Every Other Woman He Meets for the Rest of His Life, is About to Leave Him

by Matt Hale

Man, there's no such thing as ‘made for each other.’ You guys. Fact is, you've been running on inertia alone for a good three years now. You can trust me, man, she's doing you both a favor. You'd sit and stagnate for the rest of your lives, but she's finally ready to move. Good for her. Look, sticking around through the worst year of her life bought you five years but you can't coast forever. It just doesn't work that way. I know she'll always be the ‘love of your life’ (boy howdy, do I ever—you’ll pine for her incessantly until the day you die; I can already hear it) but the hard truth is you guys wouldn't have lasted five months under normal circumstances. Really think about it, Stephen. You are two of the least compatible people I can think of.

You want to know the real kicker? Before you ever even met Hannah, you actually crossed paths with the perfect woman. I hesitate to use an expression like ‘soul mate’ because it implies that there's some grand design to life—an idea which I know for a fact to be utter bullshit—but she was about as close as it gets. You remember March 12, 1998. That's not a question. You do remember. You were riding the 28 back from school and you spotted this woman clutching a bag from Recycled Records against her chest. Oh, she was just your type: geeky-pretty, gerbil-cheeked, and those ‘kind and intelligent’ eyes (your words—fact is a good 60% of people whose eyes you would describe as ‘intelligent’ conceal a brain as dumb as a bag of rocks—go figure) peeking sharply through her glasses. She got on at Taravel and immediately—you never being one to put much stock in mere physical attraction—the narrative started running through your head. “She doesn't need piercings or purple highlights to tell anyone that she's punk-rock; it oozes out of her pores. She can't stand that mall-punk shit, fuck them!”—(you cringe now, but this shit was deep when you were nineteen)—“She didn't buy that record because having a record collection is trendy, she bought it because vinyl sounds better damn it! There isn't a trendy, phony bone in her body!” She sat down across from you and a bit to the left. You were practically facing each other. She'd see it if you were staring at her but it was so hard not to. You held up your copy of Faces in the Water thinking, “It's a pretty cool book to be reading, huh? I mean, there's no movie. A woman wrote it. Of course she probably knows I'd never have picked it up if it wasn't for An Angel at My Table—damn it, I need to read more books that have absolutely no connection to movies whatsoever. Fuck! Shit!” You pretended to read as you experimented with angles you thought might let you peer at her without giving yourself away. She had this look in her eyes that revealed (to you, anyway) a human being struggling with a kind of cynical innocence; lost in the grand sense of the word—the culture into which she found herself born being utterly foreign to her: crass, ugly, mystifyingly violent—but imminently able to take care of herself, thankyouverymuch. The 19th Avenue traffic was your friend that day: Geary was forty-five minutes away if it was five. “But, of course, she could get off at any minute. Say something! Talk to a perfect stranger on the bus, are you a moron? It'll be a great story. It's you're only chance. Remember that guy that turned right around on the BART that day and started talking about his kids, his house you could see it right over there? He scared you half to death; you wanted to crawl into a hole! But you're not that guy and she's not you and what if she's as perfect as she seems and this is your only shot and what's the worst that can happen: she gets creeped out and she's uncomfortable for the rest of the trip and she thinks back on that creepy-guy-on-the-bus-what-was-HIS-deal for a little while until she forgets and maybe it pops into her head at a weird moment or two over the course of her life; a blip; a little nothing? No big deal. Talk to her. Asshole, say something. Shit, why must we put ourselves through this torture? What are you thinking? Could you like me? Do you want me? Why can't you get up and talk to me, huh? I mean, is there still that the-guy-has-to-approach-the-girl shit? Is that still a thing? Aren't we in post-feminist America I mean, I'm cool. Do you really think I'm the kind of guy that would be turned off by an assertive woman? Is that what you think of me? Well, I'll tell ya, fuck me if I was, right, I wouldn't deserve you! Fight through that out-dated cultural conditioning and say something to me if you want me! We deserve that much: the simple ability to approach someone we think might be a person we can spend some time with. Huh? See what happens?” And it's painful man—painful!—to tell you this but a remarkably similar train of thought was running through her head. She did want you. And you two are so disgustingly perfect for each other. If either of you had mustered up the courage to speak to the other, you would have spent the rest of your lives together. You would have been the kind of couple that's so happy it makes people sick except you'd have been so nice and so cool that even the most bitter asshole in the world couldn't hate you. It sounds like an exaggeration, but your mere presence would have changed people’s lives for the better. As corny as it sounds, you guys would have been an inspiration to everyone you met. But, neither of you spoke up. She got off at Balboa and you'll never see each other again.

But, shit, that's life. And I don't want to be misunderstood, here. It's not that you and that woman on the bus should have happened or there's some parallel universe where you're happy and fulfilled instead of about to be dumped by Hannah. There's no fate. There's no God (speaking of: you all need to stop with the fucking praying right now; that shit grates on my every nerve—que sera, sera motherfuckers!). There is no should-have-been or does-in-a-parallel-universe. It's just, I'm omniscient and I know what might have been but was never going to be. And, listen, I know it may sound like a contradiction to say that I know everything that's going to happen and then turn around and say there's no fate but it isn't and you'll just have to trust me on that. I could try to explain but you'd never understand. And that isn't an insult; don't get pissy. You guys are temporal animals is all. To think that it's an insult when I say that you can't understand time from the outside is like saying ‘that tree gets lousy gas mileage’ or something; it just doesn't apply.

But I digress. My point is, I know you can't imagine living without Hannah right now. I know you feel like she somehow defines you as a person. That you'd be nothing without her. But, Stephen, it really isn't so. Not that you guys never did anything for each other. If you had never met, your lives would have been better in some ways, sure, but worse in others. I can say that you'd both be a great deal happier right at this very moment if you had never met. But, on the other hand, that year would have been a lot rougher on Hannah without you. She would have made it through but the scars would have been deeper; there's no doubt about that. Before you pat yourself on the back too much, though, there is the fact that your relationship with Hannah will directly lead to the deaths of over a thousand people in a few years. It's true. Remember that time you thought you were being so cute; you guys were at Ocean Beach and you dug up that seashell she liked (not a question). Well, that was the start of a chain reaction, which will eventually lead to the most devastating typhoon in modern history. There's nothing you can do to stop it. There's no way you could have known it would happen. It's not your ‘fault’. It just is. Suck it up.

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