Monologue

It takes a lot to stay calm when you’re listening to someone’s Break-Up Story. Once The Heartbroken Soul finds you suitable to be The Listener, there is little you can do. Try sharing extensive work plans, yawn four times in a sentence to dramatise it, or form your own tragic tale. Nothing will save you, sir.

Hence, all you’ve got to do is be patient and feign interest. Because if you didn’t know the person well anyway, how do you care? Mysteriously, you’re still the chosen one, the one who will suffer, who will look for mental comfort in a pepperoni pizza and beer alongside.

He had met her long ago, he said. It must be relevant to my existence, I thought, and quietly concentrated on his fingers that held a pencil and drew a stick figure with ‘red’ marked close to its mouth. It was tough to imagine something red there initially, but I figured it must be done.

“I even remember when we met,” he added. I must be senile at twenty-three, because I don’t remember asking anything. I did enquire if he’d like to go for mushroom instead of olives. But whatdoyouknow, that reminded him of his ex-girlfriend’s favourite recipe. My luck, but if a dinosaur had walked in, it’d have reminded him of the cartoon she drew when she was five.

The evening saw me learn about the ex girlfriend’s favourite colour, numerology practice, frequency of calls she made, the number of cellphones she lost during those seven months, etc.

But she did seem like an interesting girl. How she dumped him was something I’d never heard of. She cancelled the trip they’d decided to take together, and took The New Guy instead. The Heartbroken Soul learnt about this through his Facebook page, when his ex-girlfriend uploaded those pictures. He called her objectionable names as I expressed deep disgust, while laughing out loud in my head.

They say, the stories have all been told before, but there’s nothing like listening to a drunk guy at it. It’s funny, if you don’t care about the people involved. Or not, if you belong to the helpful, approachable variety.