Our Song Played and I Had to Leave the Store
Grocery aisles are no place for a heart doing time travel.
I abandoned a full cart in aisle seven because of a synth line. Eleven items, including ice cream, which I would like the record to show I remembered and left anyway.
It was a Tuesday night supermarket, fluorescent and half empty, the kind of place where the music is chosen by an algorithm that has never loved anyone. I was comparing two brands of dish soap when the opening bars came through the ceiling speakers, those first four notes, and my body reacted before my brain had even identified the song. Wet cement in the chest. Hands going cold around a bottle of lemon-scented anything.
Everyone has one of these songs. Ask anyone about songs that remind them of an ex and watch their face do the thing your face is probably doing right now. Mine is a moderately popular track from twelve years ago that the internet would describe as "synth-pop, upbeat," which is hilarious, because for me it is a controlled demolition in D major.
Arman and I heard it for the first time in his cousin's borrowed car with the broken air conditioning, windows down, stuck at a level crossing while a freight train took its sweet time. The radio played it and he drummed the dashboard so hard the glovebox fell open, and papers went everywhere, and we were laughing and grabbing insurance documents off the floor mats when the chorus hit, and he looked at me with a face full of July and said, "This one's ours now. I'm claiming it. Done. Signed."
That was the whole ceremony.
That is all it takes, apparently, to bind a piece of music to a person for the rest of your natural life.
So there I stood in aisle seven, dish soap in hand, and the chorus was coming... I could feel it coming the way you feel a sneeze or a wave, and I had maybe eight seconds to decide whether I was going to be a functional adult about this.
I was not.
I set the soap down on a shelf of cereal, where it did not belong, and I walked out of the store into the night, and I kept walking.
Here is the part I have to tell you now, because it changes the story, and you deserve to have it changed early the way I did not.
I left him.
Arman did not break my heart in any way I am allowed to claim. Three years together and I ended it in a parking lot in October with sentences I had rehearsed in the shower, good sentences, fair ones, about wanting different lives, and every one of them was true. He cried. I did not... until later, alone, which felt like the correct order of operations for the person doing the leaving.
You are not supposed to flee supermarkets over people you left. That is the etiquette. The leaver gets the moral clarity; the left gets the sad songs. Somebody decided this long ago and nobody consulted the songs.
Nobody warns you that when you leave someone, the music does not take sides. The songs just keep playing for whoever is still listening.
I walked for an hour that night. Past the shuttered chemist, past the bus depot, down streets I had no groceries to justify. There is a particular privacy in walking alone after ten, when the shops are grilles and the streetlights hum, and your shadow does that thing where it stretches long in front of you and then swings behind you like it, too, keeps changing its mind. I let the song finish in my head, because of course it kept playing in there; leaving the store had achieved nothing except the loss of my ice cream. Interior speakers cannot be unplugged.
And I did the dangerous math you do on those walks. Twelve years since the level crossing. Seven since the parking lot. Arman married someone lovely, I know because the internet insists on telling me, and I have built a life I genuinely wanted, the different life I gave those fair rehearsed sentences about. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is missing. And still, four notes from a ceiling speaker can pick me up by the collar and set me down in a car with broken air conditioning, twenty-three years old, insurance papers on the floor, July on someone's face.
I used to think that meant something was unhealed. I have since changed my diagnosis.
A few weeks after aisle seven, I tried the internet's favorite cure. Exposure. I played the song on purpose, alone in my kitchen, arms crossed like it owed me money. Then I played it again. I played it maybe thirty times over a fortnight, while cooking, while cleaning, while answering emails, sanding it down, and the cure worked, in the way of aggressive cures. By the end... the chorus barely reached me. I had made it wallpaper.
And I felt, I swear to you, bereaved.
I called my sister and said something insane like, "I think I broke the song," and she, who has known me too long, said, "Then why do you sound like you lost the last photo of someone?"
Because that is what it was. The sting was the photograph. The flinch in aisle seven was the proof that the level crossing had happened, that a boy once claimed a song out loud with a face full of summer, that I was there, that we were real. I had confused the ache with damage, when the ache was actually storage. It was memory doing its job with the only alarm it has.
So I stopped playing it. I put it back on the high shelf where it lives, and slowly, mercifully, the song recovered its teeth. I know because six months later a cover version came on in a taxi, slowed down, sung by a woman over a piano, and my chest did the wet cement thing... and I sat in the back seat grinning like a fool while the driver watched me in the mirror with open concern.
I wrote about all of it, eventually. It started as a scribble about dish soap and became something else, the way honest scribbles do. I found I could not write about the song without writing about the leaving, and the strange grief that belongs to the person who walked away, a grief with no villain and no sympathy card, the kind you are quietly expected not to mention. There is real healing in saying an unpopular ache out loud. I even sent the finished poem to a monthly poetry contest, mostly as a dare to myself, because a thing with your name on it cannot be taken back, and I was done taking things back.
It did not win... A poem about a supermarket rarely beats a poem about a war. But a stranger who read it wrote to say she had once left a wedding reception, her own cousin's, because of a trumpet intro, and that she had never told anyone why.
Aisle seven, everywhere.
Last month I went back to that supermarket, same Tuesday hour, same fluorescent hush. I will not pretend the ceiling obliged me with the song; algorithms have no sense of drama. It played something new, something I did not know, and somewhere in the store, faintly, I heard a man singing along under his breath, badly, with feeling, the way you only sing when a song is yours.
I hope he had the sense to claim it out loud. I hope somebody was there to hear the ceremony.
I bought my eleven items. I bought the ice cream twice, one for the freezer and one to eat that night, walking home slowly under the streetlights, taking the long way, letting my shadow swing.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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