The Girls in the Room
Fiction by Liza Olson
It was the four of us in the room, playlist on “Stay With Me,” and by then you and I had already talked over the first chorus, so we both lapsed into silence and let Miki Matsubara belt out her ballad, and I think it was you who brought up that she’d died too young, regretted essentially her entire career, thought all of it was time spent away from her family, time she’d never get back once she got her diagnosis: uterine cervix cancer, late-stage, and she didn’t want to be remembered for what she ended up being remembered for, and so her music sat for decades, basically only known in Japan, until it was eventually rediscovered (and celebrated) by the internet, and sitting on the couch, just listening, I got a flash of déjà vu I couldn’t seem to shake so I sat silent on the couch, trying to piece it together, and Charlie was swaying to the song, and you were scrolling to find the next one, and Sam was jostling his leg to the beat, and I was reconstructing a memory I wasn’t sure I’d ever had, and it felt like looking through a one-way mirror at a version of myself I couldn’t fully recognize, that I maybe never could, that looking like this, being this woman that’d been sitting in the back of my mind like an undeveloped polaroid, it opened a release valve on the boiler of my depression, that with that now inert, it freed up so much space in my head, almost too much: miles and miles of unfinished rooms, with featureless walls and oddly familiar carpet, rooms I felt incomprehensibly tiny inside of, and I tried to place you in any area you might fit: maybe we met at a mutual friend’s house at sixteen, both of us drunk and high and neither of us transitioned yet, not even close, and so we did what was the custom in that time for sixteen-year-old “boys”: played Guitar Hero on some shitty tube TV on Expert, trying to show off to the girls in the room, neither of us knowing one day we’d be the girls in the room, and I remember now, or I guess I’m acquiring the memories of, this me, I don’t know, it’s hard to wrap my head around, but this me had to untangle the disparate threads of identity and attraction, how she wanted to present, how much of her fascination with women was driven by wanting to be with them vs. wanting to look like them, not having the language for it, so she just went for years and years, as her soul leaked out of her body, letting it all fade as she put something else inside, anything to fill the void, or maybe we met at some hipster-y video rental store in Wicker Park in the apotheosis of our egg forms, broken like Winston and Julia meeting in the cafe at the end, our beard-partners with us, Klaus Nomi on the screen, outsider art pop VHS, and we saw his makeup, consoled ourselves thinking maybe we could settle for a closeted femboy identity, but we knew it wouldn’t be enough, how could it be, but other possibilities seem more remote the longer you run away from yourself, until the you you now hate has become the sunk cost fallacy that is your daily waking life, and if you change one thing then you’ll have to change another, and what if your shoulders stay “too big” to pass for a woman, and what if your face never looks quite right, and what if the people in your life don’t understand, what if you end up all alone, all the what-ifs that are barely more intolerable than your actual reality, but even then only just, and then again, maybe it all went differently that day: maybe we checked out the Nomi together, under your account but paid with my card, and maybe we ditched the beards and grabbed a couple city Divvy bikes, pedaled furiously down Milwaukee Ave toward your studio apartment, catching only the briefest of glimpses of our reflections in the storefronts we’d pass and imagining slimmer figures, longer hair, the we-to-be, and maybe we popped that tape into your old hand-me-down VCR, rewound it a half a dozen times that night, let it play out all our possibilities, the people we imagined but never dared put a voice to, and even while we were staring dull-eyed at a present we hadn’t wanted we had those futures living inside of us, eggs waiting to crack, and maybe that morning you had yours scrambled and I went for over easy, and maybe we ate while booking our HRT appointments, made a pact that even if we wouldn’t make it through these breakups and reckonings and transitions that we’d at least give it the old college try, and in the end that’s really all you can do, unless you follow dysphoria all the way into oblivion, and that wasn’t an option anymore, couldn’t be, and even now I’m not remembering it exactly as it happened but maybe the details don’t matter so much as this feeling does, this stupid-happy moment: this end credits reality of finally getting to be the girls in the room.
Liza Olson is the author of the novels Here’s Waldo, The Brother We Share, and Afterglow. She’s also the Editor-in-Chief of (mac)ro(mic). A Best of the Net nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and 2021 Wigleaf longlister in and from Chicagoland, she’s been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Cleaver, Pithead Chapel, and other fine places. Find her online at lizaolsonbooks.com or on Twitter @lizaolsonbooks.
