Excerpt: I Think We’ve Been Here Before by Suzy Krause

Excerpted with permission from Radiant Press

CHAPTER ONE

Having your heart broken is like finding out you have bedbugs—not in an emotional sense, but practically. Both broken hearts and bedbugs require extreme treatment. You can’t just wash your sheets and think that’s enough. Not only is it not enough, you’ve likely made the problem worse by carting your dirty laundry all over the place.

You can get your house fumigated (this could be a metaphor for therapy), but even that won’t be enough, because the memories will be as bad as the bugs themselves. They’ll continue to plague you whether they’re there or not, crawling all over your legs and feet as you lie awake at night, unable to sleep. When you put on that T-shirt, you’ll feel them running up your neck into your hair. They’ll make their home in all the quiet, innocuous places in your life, burrowing into memories and holidays and songs and smells, and every time you think you’ve gotten rid of the last one, you’ll discover that you were an idiot to think there would ever be a last one.

That’s not how bedbugs work, and it’s not how broken hearts work.

No, a broken heart requires more than a trip to the dumpster or a visit from a licensed exterminator. You have to get rid of the mattress, the rug, the other furniture, the pillows, the clothing in the closet. The closet.

The house.

Replace it all. New Everything.

Nora doesn’t know that starting over like this is a privilege reserved almost exclusively for the young. She doesn’t know that metaphorical fumigation is often the only option when you’re, say, forty, and you have a job and a mortgage and responsibilities and friends and New Everything is just a lot of work, a lot of money you don’t have. She doesn’t think about it because she doesn’t have to; she simply does what young people do, what young people are uniquely able to do: in the face of her first real broken heart, she gets on an airplane and finds New Everything.

She finds a fifth-floor apartment on Greifswalder Strasse and a view of reddish-brown rooftops out the slanted ceiling window. Thin daisy curtains and unframed band posters and fake chrysanthemums in a dollar store vase by the sink. Two roommates, one from the States and one from Germany.

She finds a new language and a new currency. Air that feels and smells new and people who interact with each other in a new way and new things to look at (mostly buildings, all of them ironically very old, with giant, brightly colored murals painted all over them).

She finds a new coffee shop, named Begonia, on a street with a long, hyphenated name she doesn’t know how to pronounce yet. It’s a modern place, lots of tile and wood, a neon-pink sign behind the counter spelling out its name in sharp calligraphy. You can buy indie electronica albums with your freshly squeezed orange juice, and you can sit by the window and watch all the fascinating strangers walk by on the sidewalk outside. Everything here feels like it is trying specifically, pointedly, to be the opposite of where she grew up—a rural Saskatchewan village full of quiet, blond Norwegian Canadians; no lights, neon or traffic; no indie electronica albums. No sidewalks, even.

She appreciates the effort Berlin has made to help her feel emphatically not at home. Maybe her brain can be persuaded that this is not just a new beginning, but that it is the beginning. Nora’s beginning. That nothing has ever happened to her before, that she came into existence in Berlin at nineteen years old, has never been in love, has never been hurt. Maybe an alternative to what feels impossible—healing a broken heart—could be to convince it that it had never been broken to begin with, that it, the heart itself, is new.

She found Begonia through a work-abroad program recommended to her by her high school guidance counselor, an opportunity that had sounded, at the time, laughable, impossible, torturous. After all, Nora had a boyfriend at the time, and he was the love of her life, and moving that far away from him would kill both of them! They would literally die if they were separated, as though Cupid’s arrow had pierced them through major arteries and could never be removed without fatal blood loss.

Now she knows: he would’ve been fine. Cupid had merely grazed him, and his wound healed insultingly fast.

(Is there anything more humiliating than one-sided romance?)

She’s early for her meeting with Begonia’s owner, soon to be her boss, so she buys a coffee, no cream or sugar, and sits in a soft velvet chair by the window, admiring the mural on the building across the street, a vibrant display of birds, penguins and blue jays and hawks and pheasants and falcons, one of those paintings with so many fantastic details you’d need days to notice them all—and she’ll have time to do this. This is comforting. She will spend enough time here for this mural to become familiar. Maybe the knowledge of this is why it already seems like something she’s seen before, something that makes her feel at home.

The door opens and Nora sits up straight.

She senses his presence, like he’s bad weather or air-conditioning, something that changes the atmosphere and makes her skin prickle. When she looks, she’s half expecting something paranormal or extraterrestrial, something shining or radiating—but it’s just a man.

He’s tall but not giant, wearing a black T-shirt with the word SPOON written across the front. Handsome but not supernaturally so, not someone whose presence should cause this much inner chaos. But she can feel him and more than that: she knows him from somewhere. Not recognizes, not like he’s someone she walked past on the street earlier or someone who went to the same high school as her but ran in different circles; she knows him.

She begins flying around inside her brain, sorting through mental filing cabinets, trying to find the memories that correspond with his face, coming up short. This man is as familiar as her childhood home, a place she lived in that now lives in her. She has kissed him. Held his hand, cried on his shoulder. His presence is comforting and calming; he’s safe. These aren’t memories; she doesn’t remember any of this at all. They’re just facts, things she knows, fluttering into her mind as though they’ve been written on scraps of paper and stuffed into her ears.

But there’s so much missing. She has no idea who he is. She doesn’t know where she met him or anything concrete about him. It’s all just some kind of visceral, emotional déjà vu. She starts to say his name, but as she opens her mouth, she realizes she doesn’t know it.

Everything is new. Everything is opposite and unexpected and different, except this man.

He’s as old as her reflection in the mirror.

How?