Otherplace: Viola - Girlfriend Shirt
Dear Sebastian,
Here is a page for you and your files.
Stay well.
Love and rockets,
Viola
From the Doomsday Books of Viola Morton
When I wake this morning, there is a blue rubber band twisted at the bottom of my hair, brushing against my chest, over my heart. I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t put it there. There aren’t any blue rubber bands in my house, none in the kitchen drawers, none in the recycling bin wrapped around the junk mail.
The blue rubber band is a mystery.
I spend a minute or two untangling it from my hair, then put it on the top of my nightstand, between the phone charger and the Anaïs Nin book I have been reading before bed.
I don’t like mysteries.
I get out of bed and go to the window, pulling the curtain open a crack, and putting my eye to it. The sun is out, bright, clear. I am not ready for the sun, so I shut the curtain and go about getting ready for the day in the dimmer light of my room.
Where did that blue rubber band come from?
There is a fragrance in the air, a hint of a scent, drifting like smoke in the current that sneaks from one badly-caulked window to another: cinnamon.
Iris, I think. It’s been three days since she was last here, in this house, in my bedroom, but the ghost of her lingers.
Last week, Iris stayed here in this room, during the storm that threw rain against the windows and broke lightning against the sky. She stood at the window in the dark, curtains pulled back, and watched the rain playing down the glass, while I stayed in bed, looking at the way her silhouette appeared and vanished between the flashes from the clouds. She was wearing a T-shirt from my drawer, an old oversized R.E.M. tour shirt I’d found in a thrift shop, long enough on her to cover her to mid-thigh, same as it does on me.
I’m borrowing this shirt when I go home, she said. It’s going to be my boyfriend shirt.
I’m not a boy, I said.
Then it’ll be my girlfriend shirt, she replied.
I pick up the blue rubber band and twirl it around my fingers. I think of twirling Iris’s hair between them as well, in this room, in my bed, in the dark/light of the rainstorm. Was there a rubber band in her hair that night? Did it come untangled when we were both distracted by other very much more distracting things?
I have changed my sheets since then. Clean sheets with no rubber bands in them.
Tomorrow, I will be seeing Iris at her apartment, bringing us dinner from the falafel place up the road.
I will be taking one of her shirts when I leave, a girlfriend shirt for a girlfriend shirt.
I will be leaving the blue rubber band in her bed.
I don’t like mysteries.
But I like them a little more when I share them with a girlfriend.
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