Don’t Abandon Me

“Don’t Abandon Me”

Daniel Taa

      Running away from the feeling of abandonment, he sat patiently for his first love to come back. He sat at the park bench, hoping that she would realize that it was him who she truly loved. Joe Bronzeman knew that the very spot where he last saw his then girlfriend should be the very spot where they would meet up again at last.

     He was sure that this was nothing further from the truth, that she simply would go to college until she realized that there was no other man on Earth who could make her feel the way he made her feel. Joe Bronzeman was sure on this day that today would be the day. Though he was given awkward looks from people at the park, he remained cheerful and hopeful. Then the next day came. He once read an inspirational quotation that said that success is moving from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. He would deprive himself of breakfast, lunch, and dinner because he knew that if he made one wrong move, that the slight chance of her not being there while he was eating lunch somewhere else would be one moment that could dramatically alter the future of his romantic life.

       He got smarter day after day. He would take notes in a notebook which would outline the probability and timeframe of her coming back to him. He calculated that she may have met someone in her undergraduate years, then she would be happy while getting her Master’s Degree, but after getting her Doctorate’s degree and getting a job as a dentist, she would want to explore options outside of the guy he met at college, and so in approximately 13 years from now, she would grow restless of all the other men and the guy he met at college, then she would have no choice to come back to the park bench when they last saw each other. December Twenty First, 2024 between the hours of 12 pm and 3 pm was the calculated date which she would return.

     To make the result successful, he was going to sit at the bench writing love letters to her in his journal in order to compensate for the wild probability that she would return back to her. Sitting religiously at the park bench would allow the numbers to work in a manner more favorable for success. Every day, he wrote a letter to her. For 13 years, he sat at the park bench writing to the woman who left him for a man he met at a new student orientation for college. He wrote and he wrote, his beard grew longer, his hair grew longer.

       On December Twenty First, he shaved his beard, wore a clean collared shirt and showed up with gym bags full of notebooks. It was twelve pm as he sat with two Whoppers from Burger King, two sodas, and two large fries. When 12 o’clock came, he began eating. She might have had a little squabble at work and should be driving here soon, he told himself. By 2:00 pm, he told himself, she might have just forgotten the necklace I gave her at home, to show me that she still loved me By 3:00 pm he was about to tell himself that she just totally forgot about me… until a woman showed up in front of him who was not his girlfriend and just started talking wildly, with excitement, as if she were courting him, or to a lesser degree, as if she were in danger.  

      Then she said plainly, “Look man, I’m a publisher at Harper Collins. I used to be a therapist before I started editing and publishing books. And I’ve been observing you for the last ten years. Everyday, you wake up at 6:00 am and you walk to this park bench and write until you fall asleep. You fall asleep around 5 pm when the sun sets on the coast. By then, I’m able to read your notebooks. You have enough discipline to become a bestselling author with your work. I have also psycho-analyzed you by correlating your behavior with your love letters, and I know that you have abandonment issues. You sit here like you are waiting for your parents to pick you up after school or after practice and they showed up late so that traumatized you one day when it actually happened. This type of trauma stems from the natural fear of your parents not being in your life anymore, so you made a bargain with yourself that if you just stayed a little longer, and became more patient, that comfort and love would come. Are your parents divorced?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I don’t know what the correlation between the fear of an individual’s parents dying and the psychological abandonment perpetuated in a divorce is, but I do know that if these letters don’t get published and I don’t date you now, that you’d be wasting your whole life waiting for a woman who forced herself to forget about you so that she wouldn’t have to feel guilty about cheating on you; and all this work wouldn’t get to the right people and you wouldn’t know what it feels like to live a normal adult life because you were so in love that you did not feel like letting her go. And I’ve worked with enough people to see this happen right before my eyes without them knowing it.”

“What do I have to do?”

“You can be abandoned, but you can’t abandon me, please.”

“I will try not to,” he said.

”Okay, is anyone eating that burger?”

”Nope. All yours.”

”Thanks”

”So why did you stop counseling?”

”Because I thought that I could do more good by inadvertently writing stories for people. I mean, like a good romance story could alter a person’s perception of love possibly more effectively than cordial talks with people who you are supposed to have a good relationship with, but not so deep as to cross HIPPA laws or to effectively form a strong bond to effectively get someone back on their feet”

”And because behavioral problems in adults stem from an unresolved romantic problem?”

”Yes. You catch on quick.”