On Monday, I looked at my social media. The most likes I had ever received for a photo was for a post where I was swinging bells for ‘A Carol of Bells’ at Christmas. I got forty-two for that post. Most people did not want to support my orchestra. They were my age and anything else was preferable to them. I got twenty likes from my closest friends whenever I posted anything, but I had hundreds of friends on Facebook and they mostly refrained from commenting on whatever I was doing… until Shannon tagged me in a picture.

What followed was an unholy outpouring of interest.

In the picture, we were sitting at a bus stop. She had her legs over my lap and her arm around my neck. My arm was around her waist. We had a pair of earbuds strung from my phone with one in her ear and one in mine. We wore sunglasses and blew huge bubbles of blue bubble gum. The two of us were such an outburst of color and life, I wasn’t sure if anyone noticed that she had vandalized the wall behind us with a heavy-duty pen. It read, “The purpose of our lives is to love one another.”

It had a hundred and twenty likes.

As I scanned through the names, Simon’s was there. He had given it a WOW emoji, which meant he hadn’t liked it. Further down, a collection of my ex-girlfriends had weighed in. All were overly eager to wish me well.

Shannon and I had spent the entire day together, taking pictures and getting to know each other. For me, it was becoming clearer and clearer why every man was in love with her. She was unpredictable. On our date, she had taken a marker and written on my forearm, “Mine.”

I had been really excited, feeling my heart hammer in my chest. How badly did I want to be hers?

She hesitated and then wrote, “Field” after it.

She was a love rollercoaster.

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“Ever think of getting a tattoo?” I asked her.

“I don’t want to mark myself. I want to mark everything else,” she replied.

Aside from the kiss I pressed her into on our first date, I tried my best not to appear overeager. Her job was to eat my heart and I had been a fool to think she wasn’t good at it. I had to think of a strategy to get her to say that she wanted to be my girlfriend, but for the time being my brain was blank. I had never tried to be the male equivalent of what she was. I didn’t know how to make a woman want me so much she couldn’t think.

One thing was certain, she wanted connection, but I knew from experience with other artists that she didn’t want a connection with just anybody. She wanted a connection with someone who gave her something she could not get anywhere else.

Being in the orchestra did not pay all my bills. As a matter of fact, it did not pay most of them. When I played for the orchestra, I was often paid in honorariums. I also did odd one-shots where I was paid for covering for other musicians. On a normal workday, I put in hours at a music store, selling sheet music and giving musical demonstrations to parents who were renting instruments for their children. For my fourth side hustle, I constructed specialty xylophones and sold them online.

Giving seven hundred dollars to Natalie for the opportunity of being handcuffed to Shannon had been insanely excessive. Normally, I was frugal to a fault. I hadn’t known that dating Shannon would be the crown of my romantic history.

Thinking back, Natalie had thought she killed Shannon after she hit her over the head. Natalie was screaming and swearing. I called to her and asked her to bring Shannon into the camp kitchen so I could confirm whether or not she was dead, since Natalie was too deranged to know if something was dead or alive. After checking her pulse, I comforted Natalie, saying Shannon would be fine. At that moment, something about the unconscious girl’s face had struck me as familiar. I asked Natalie who she was.

“She’s Shannon Bilx,” Natalie had told me.

The rest was history. I told her about my cousin, Simon, and convinced her to calm down, give me the keys, take the money and leave without looking back.

Reminiscing, I had seen a different photo of Shannon almost every week for over two years. Even when I thought everything was great between her and Simon, I had been curious about her. Secretly, I had wanted to meet her, wondered why Simon had been able to win her, felt sorry for him when things with her hadn’t gone his way, and hoped there was a woman like that on my horizon. Her appeal was everywhere. She made everything shine.

What did a girl who saw beauty in dirty alleyways want?