It’s Thursday night, and I’m hanging out in The Cave. My friends and I have just gotten out of Budget and Finance class.
I’m with a friend of mine and we’ve stopped off for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and some late night conversation with the cashier. We hang around till almost closing time, the cashier starts to clean the tables and my friend and I get up to leave.
We’re heading out when, behind us, we hear the cashier’s voice, “Hey guys, look at what I’ve found!”
We hold up and head over to where the cashier is. Meeting us half way, she hands over a napkin to my buddy.
“What is it?” I ask. The cashier shrugs and chuckles.
“It’s a note somebody left on one of the tables,” she says.
My friend reads over it and gets this strange look on his face, then passes me the napkin.
It’s a note, written in black ink, in a very round, feminine print.
Starting in the upper left hand corner, and written down diagonally are some lyrics from “You Are My Sunshine:”
The other night dear / as I lay sleeping / I dreamed I held you / in my arms. / But when I woke dear / I was mistaken / and I hung my head and I cried / You are my sunshine .
My first thought was about how sad that song, apparently, could be.
I thought about the words for a while, and then I decided to look at the writing itself: the soft round letters, the care taken to keep the lines fairly straight on unlined paper. But what really caught my eye, was that the author had written “I CRIED” in all caps.
Curious, I unfolded the napkin and found more lyrics, more modern.
A line from Staind, written in a little cloud like the thoughts of a character in a comic strip:
It’s always raining in my head; forget all the things I should have said.
Then a line from Linkin Park in big round print:
Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter.
Back on the side with “You Are My Sunshine” was drawn a picture of a heart with a crack in it, beneath it was written this:
A broken hearted female wrote this on this napkin, I hope some broken hearted male reads it.
Why, I began to wonder, did some “broken hearted female” leave this napkin for someone else to find? Not just any someone else, a male someone else? What was her story?
I began to imagine.
Perhaps she had liked some young man a great deal, and they broke up. Maybe she told him she loved him and he ran away. It could be that she had asked some guy out, or to be hers forever and he simply told her “no.”
I think all of us have experienced at least one of those scenarios at some time or another.
The common theme of rejection and the need for acceptance. The need to be needed, wanted, connected. It’s why we have religion, government, sex, ceremony, school, love, marriage, children, bars, libraries, malls, and theaters. It’s why we have music. It’s why we have expression.
Expression implies not only getting things “out in the open,” but having them understood by someone else. It’s how we say, this is me, look at me, understand and accept it.
Every person’s greatest wish is to be able to be themselves, quirks, selfish wants, odd needs and all; to be hailed as unique and loved for how they are different. Their greatest fear is that this is not possible, and that unique means singular, meaning one, meaning alone.
People want to be individuals, but only within the context of the group. We want to be our own person, just like everybody else.
Love is then, perhaps, the greatest paradox, for it is only by having our own identities that we can be completely assimilated and connected to someone else. Society manages to all at once bring us together and hold us back.
You see, the story doesn’t matter. Names don’t matter, and neither do times, places and specifics of the case. The story is always the same. We are all a part of it. Maybe as individuals we have our own stories.
If this is true then perhaps we are, as lovers, part of a larger story, one that expands to our block, our city, our culture, until it becomes one big story, The Big Story, the story of man. The one that began “In the beginning” or up in the trees, generation after generation telling the same stories from creation to demolition. Tens of thousands of broken hearts have written on just as many scrolls, scraps and napkins, the stories as old as love and loss themselves.
And every generation passes on the old stories, adding new tales and twists. Indeed now, perhaps, our young heroine’s wish will now come true. For some broken-hearted man will now probably read this, and I will have put my two cents into The Big Story.
Who knows 20 years from now, another broken hearted male might stumble across this archive and the story will go on.
She will go on. I will go on. We will all go on. I do guarantee one thing though.
Ten generations from now there will be other broken hearts who will use the scrap, the detritus, of the day and they will leave a posting about their broken heart, leaving it for someone else to find, and the story of man will continue.

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