The Rest of You

My roommate leaves her bedroom wearing large sunglasses and a Dolly Parton wig, blonde ringlets bouncing on her way to the restroom. In the hallway we stop for small talk, and she explains that this, pointing at her head, is for Chatroulette. I’ll let them see me, she says, playing with a plastic curl from her wig, but I won’t let them hear my voice.

The girl at the liquor store forgets to add me on the e-mailing list for wine tasting. She reminds me of this each time, and each time she makes it a point to take my email address again and again. Each time she offers a compliment. Tonight it’s my jeans. They are jeans, she asks, stocking merchandise. Yes, I say.

On the walk home I look up at an apartment building I pass everyday and find the disembodied head of the Virgin staring out a dark window from the third floor, the head so large it can fill an entire living room. It’s both terrifying and amazing, blank stone eyes the shape of sole fish in the night. I begin to wonder about the rest of her, if the rest of her is also in pieces—if her hands can be found lying somewhere in a garden, or maybe in another apartment, another living room, the open palms used as a fainting bed.

This is what I think of the internet. Sometimes we catch one another watching the other, moving through public and private rooms—pieces of us seen and then gone. And each time we’re different because of it.