“Wow, Sybil, get your ass over here and check out this closet. It’s like bigger than the whole place!” I bellow, wiping the sweat from my brow. We just finished unloading the last box from the back of my car.
“There’s enough room for both of us to hang up our shit,” she squawks.
“Hell, no, sistah, we’re gonna roshambo for it! It’s a luxury one of us should take full advantage of,” I quip as I square toward her and throw up my fist resting on the palm of my other hand. I know how to rock, paper, scissor my way into any situation, I’m quite good at it . . . until today.
“Fine, one, two, three.” She counts before slamming her fist down in unison with mine. She drops the infamous rock and well, when my two fingers protrude from my fist, my fate is sealed and the first game of three is lost. Sybil wins two out of three roshambos, and in less than two minutes claims her closet. To the victor goes the spoil, well, all except for a little section in the front right side, a spot she reserves for me, just in case I have something that doesn’t fit in my rickety freestanding armoire. Me being the stubborn shit I am, I never give into her requests and eventually she absorbs that space with more clothes she’s never gonna wear. But today is the last time I’ll ever play roshambo, with anyone. I learn my lesson; she is the best at anticipating people’s choices.
I let the awkwardness roll across my skin as I pulled open the closet next to her bed and stared at all of her things. Dresses and tops she’d let me borrow a hundred times before, methodically hung from the clothing rods. I thought about the moments where I’d been in this closet before, where she had let me rifle through her clothes because she insisted I wear something of hers. Now, I was in her closet rifling because she didn’t have a voice. Sybil would never have the option to tell me it was okay, ever again.
There wasn’t a square inch of her closet she didn’t use. Stacked boxes of high heels on the shelf above her dual clothes rods, and shoe organizer hung on the inside of the door. It was organized by outfits, and their matching shoes. She had so many dresses which reminded me of events that marked our lives beyond what we had in common. I pushed her clothes apart, noticing the little black leather dress she wore when she had an overnighter at the Sir Francis Drake. She was so excited to find red alligator skin pumps which looked like they were made for that dress. She looked beautiful with her deep red bristled hair and shoes to match.
I collected a heavy handful of her clothes from the closet and laid them across her bed. A ritual which tore my heart apart with each step I took back and forth between her closet and her bed. Tears poured down my cheeks as each stack I created became the story of her life where someone either threw her away or paid for who they wanted her to be. I added the last cluster of designer coats and sweaters, balancing on the disorganized stack of shirts on the bed when a hollowed clank of something that tumbled to the hardwood floor and rolled under my bed. Normally, I wouldn’t care but today life was different, my life was slow and heavy and moved at a pace where everything seemed thick and raw, magnified by who was missing in our apartment’s silence.
I crumpled to the floor, and landed rough against the shaggy black area rug between our beds. My knees rippled with pain. My face burned hot while cool tears clustered at the edges of my eyes, and I ached to go numb. I just wanted to disappear, get lost in my pain. I wanted to have one more moment where I had the chance to say goodbye, to tell Sybil that in my own twisted way, I loved her like a sister, she was the only person who made me feel worthy of having a family to love me.