So you turn all your white T-shirts pink. I only see you in one but I know it's all of them because you wouldn't wear a white-T-shirt-turned-pink if you had a normal white T-shirt. It's not like pink-pink, it's more of a barely-there-pink, but when a white T-shirt boy's T-shirts become barely-there-pink T-shirts, the pink is obviously there.

When we talk in front of the coffee shop by the church on 21st Street after you try to pretend you don't see me but we make eye contact and thus both feel obligated to stop, I don't say anything about your shirt. I do stare at it so hard that I wonder if the shadow of my eyes is stuck to the fabric. In the end, I'm not worried because in the past I have stared at so much of you that if the shadow of my eyes was going to get stuck to the fabric, technically most of your existence would already be covered.

You ask me how I'm doing and I tell you that I'm doing fine but you don't really care. I ask you how you're doing and you tell me that you're good and I care more than you do, but not all that much because I know you never answer this question truthfully. Once upon a time I knew everything about you because after midnight and when the lights were out your tongue would slip like not seeing the black ice and I would catch the secrets that fell out. I still have them. But you are a different you now, the way I am a different me than I was that day you touched my hand in the parking lot or when I wrote the first sentence of this paragraph, and different people hold different types of baggage. They accumulate more. They have different things to attend to. Apparently I don't know what you keep in your bags anymore.

I think the weirdest thing about this whole thing is knowing that you own something red enough to do this. I think the weirdest thing is knowing that you own something so red in general. I think when you know the inside of someone's head so well you think you know what's inside their closet too, or their bedside drawers or their bathroom cabinets or their bookshelves. You've left enough stuff on my desk and under my couch cushions that I'd think I'd know if you owned something that color.

There are these very terrible green sweatpants I own that my dad says are ugly, but you told me you liked them. When you jumped ship, or rather, lowered yourself into the water quietly, I promised I would never wear them again. Honestly, though, I wash them all the time so they're always a choice. I feel like you'd know every color in my closet. But also, maybe you've forgotten. That's what started this lowering yourself out of my line of vision—you're always forgetting things: you forget about dinner, you forget about the party, you forget to call, you forget to tell me that you've gotten home okay. That was you tying the rope to the side of the boat.

And that's what feels so uncomfortable about the way your eyes dart here on the sidewalk and the way I keep bringing hair in front of my shoulders like I am trying to hide as much of my body from you as I can. It's knowing how much of me you have that you will never wear on your sleeve, but instead hide in various pockets or old bags or beneath your bed and I will never be able to find them and no one will ever know you have them, and maybe you will mess up and one day they'll just be pink. I liked you better before I knew you washed your clothes the wrong way.

And so I look at my phone and oh I'm late which I'm not and my tongue slips like not seeing black ice and I tell you that maybe we should hang out soon. You say you're running late too which you're not but you say that yes, we should hang out soon, but I know you'll "forget" or you'll forget and I won't have to worry about reminding or convincing or whatevering myself that I'm not still in love with you and that I have to act that way when the lights turn out and I can only see the shape of you with my hands.

When you walk away I don't know who you are. This has faded into something that is the same color, but not the same shade, so sometimes I think it's my favorite color even though it's not. Your shirt is pink enough and your hair has grown long enough that from the back, I wouldn't recognize you as quick as I always could have. Remember when I used to tell everyone that you only had white T-shirts in your closet and I believed myself? I liked you better when I was sure I knew what was in your closet.

I liked you better when I was sure I knew where you were at one a.m.. I liked you better when I was sure I knew what you were thinking. I liked you better when I was sure I knew what you wanted from me. I liked you better when I was sure I knew where on the ship you were, that you weren't hanging ropes, that you weren't in the water. I liked you better before your shirts were pink. I liked you better before, when I was sure I knew you owned nothing so red.



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Gabriela Gonzales is a three-time Sandra Hutchins Humanities Symposium first-place winner in Fiction. She lives in Nashville.

Read Kelly Davis' 2½ Questions interview with Gabriela.

Read Gabriela's postcard.

Detail of art on main page courtesy of Darwin Bell.

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