My Ex's Girlfriend Looks Like Me
Written by Kira Salter-Gurau
Image courtesy of Kira Salter-Gurau
Sitting at a table outside a Pret a Manger in Boston at midnight, I listened as my ex confessed to me that I was still her type. A text message from her girlfriend pinged in her pocket. Ignoring it, she fidgeted with her rings and slid up her sleeves to heavily tattooed forearms brimming with flowers in black picture frames and jagged lyrics from her favorite band. Her faded flat top haircut had grown out a bit from the last time I’d seen her. It had been a whole summer. Our relationship had barely gotten off the ground before it ended, and I spent more time imagining our bodies entangling more than they ever really had.
“You know what my type is…” she said, cutting into me.
When someone asks me what my type is, I play off the question with“ I don’t have a type!” I banter in the way people respond in street interviews: spontaneous and hilarious and intriguing and beautiful. If a friend is nearby they roll their eyes and let me keep lying, because if I am anything, I am a woman of patterns.
We matched on Tinder and she told me I had a beautiful smile, or maybe I had beautiful eyes, I can’t remember. The first photo I saw of her caught my attention in the same way a familiar scent brings you pause-–the smell of cookies your mom used to make growing up, a lavender perfume that your aunt used to dab around her neck. This girl with brown eyes and tattoos and a low voice wafted towards me. I closed my eyes and inhaled.
Every time I like someone, the girl will be funny but never make me laugh. She’ll be good at texting but bad at communicating. She’ll wear overalls and drink americanos. Often, she’s a Taurus. This girl was an Aquarius. This girl had a lot of friends who had cool haircuts and restaurant jobs and she always laughed at the wrong point in my jokes. I could never seem to get to the punchline right and on this particular rainy evening, I was telling her about my clumsy professor and she started to laugh midway through the joke. She did something that I love: she scanned my body. In nothing but a baby blue floor-length skirt and a black tank, I clutched my arms in the slight drizzle. The street to our left was sleek and reflective, making the late evening glow.
“ You should go,” I said.
“ You have homework?”
I shook my head. She’d just gotten off her shift at a local wine bar. She was a year older than me. She studied psychology in Boston and liked that I was a writer.
Cheating isn’t something I subscribe to. I’m scared that’s because I’ve never gotten the chance to do it.
She always used to tell me that if I had glasses, I’d be her type to a tee. I had green eyes. I had curly hair. I was Jewish. Tempted as I was, I withheld my family’s history of escaping Germany in 1941 for fear of her cumming in the middle of dinner. Her wet dream was the sexy Jewish English teacher wearing a knit cardigan.
The week after we ended things, I went to the optometrist when I got home from summer break and pushed for the thin rimmed $300 reading prescription that the doctor described as“ optional.” I posted selfies on Instagram, then took the glasses off and rubbed my eyes for ten minutes, as the glasses made me dizzy. A few months ago I saw her post a photo of a girl who looked eerily similar to me, with glasses on.
My ex once walked into the bodega where I worked in Eastie with a different girlfriend. It was a bright Sunday afternoon and I had twenty minutes left of my shift. With no customers coming into the store, I had spent the last several hours picking at ingrown hairs on my upper arm. The bell jingled and my arm pulsed. The new woman was pretty and thin. Her nose was almost identical to mine. She had light eyes that twinkled as she introduced herself to me:“ Jesse,” she said, nodding her head for me to give my name. I was Frankenstein’s monster in a groutfit looking at Frankenstein 2.0, who was browsing neatly stacked piles of tinned fish. My face flushed and I slipped into cashier mode, asking them where they were off to for the day, if I could give them a bag on the way out. When they left I turned green, stuck a bolt in my head and wandered around Boston terrorizing the preschoolers and commuters. The news covered it.“ Frankenstein’s Monster Doesn’t Feel Special” the headline read.
Months later I’d run into her with an even newer girlfriend, this one with greener eyes, frizzy brown hair. Some classmates and I were picking through a vintage market when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was great to see her. The girlfriend was nice. They always are.
Once the two of them broke up I ran into the frizzy haired girl at Whole Foods. We laughed over our shared Frankenstein’s humor and the wine bar and her tendency to laugh before the joke was over. I waved goodbye to my little clone and I haven’t seen her since. I have this theory that all of the Jewish girlfriends with curly hair and green eyes are experiments that the government needs to gather up and dispose of. There’s a bunker in the middle of Arizona with dozens of us, braiding each others’ hair and singing songs about the rapture. This must mean that I’m always on the run, sanding down my fingerprints, slipping in and out of one horse town.
When she used to open the door for me, my ex, she would draw her hand across my lower back, a sensation that made the back of my neck tingle. The first time I’d felt fingers drawing across my back like that, tickling my lower spine in that same dance was a few years prior, with another girl who had the same colored eyes. We’ll call her Mary. Waiting for a callback for an all girl’s production of Lord of The Flies, I sat with my Mary, going over our lines. Mary and I had been called back for the same role of Piggy. He’s the fat one with asthma and glasses who wears sweaters and I believe he is Jewish. I know someone who would be very attracted to Piggy. His character is the voice of reason among this wild group of young adults. He’s the civilized one, finding calm in the madness of fighting for one’s life. Mary and I snuck off to the bathroom during the break. Her hand rested on my shirt, the warmth seeping through to my skin, as she held the door for me.
She had a few more callbacks that day. We hooked up that night and midway through she got an email relaying that she’d landed one of the parts she auditioned for that day. The screen lit up her face as she scrolled through the email, sheepish. She was thrilled. I tucked her short straight hair behind her ears and congratulated her softly in her ear. She was shorter than me when we were standing. They’re always shorter than me. Neither of us got Piggy. Neither of us were destined to be the voice of reason.
Mary ended things a few days before Valentine’s Day. I stood there with my arms outstretched revealing a handmade card. There were little birds on it and daisies. It was sweet, but came on a bit strong. She tried to explain that she wasn’t ready for anything serious but my ears and brain shut down. Her roommates listened outside the door. If I could go back I’d ask more questions and tell her that it made sense. Instead, I tucked the card back into my pajama bottoms and left quietly.
I’d talk with another girl who had the same haircut, brown eyes and same birthday as Mary and my ex and it would end awkwardly, as they always do. The differences in these brown eyed women usually lay in our endings. A rejected valentine. Differing political beliefs. Commitment issues. Talking to another girl at the same time. Summer break.
My friends fall for their own set of Frankenstein’s monsters. My best friend loves men who understand Pokemon references and work in the film industry. My sister falls for high femmes with long hair and great eyebrows. A woman I know from college posts the same transmasc person every other month with the same glasses and a wolf cut; the only differences lay in their names and social security numbers.
“My friends fall for their own set of Frankenstein’s monsters. My best friend loves men who understand Pokemon references and work in the film industry. My sister falls for high femmes with long hair and great eyebrows. A woman I know from college posts the same transmasc person every other month with the same glasses and a wolf cut; the only differences lay in their names and social security numbers.”
Whether it’s straight girls who give too much eye contact, masc lesbians who used to play softball or bisexual women with mommy issues, we all have our kryptonite, the monsters, the potholes we trip into with legs trembling. I love seeing lesbians who don’t have a type. Partners who walk at different paces, work different jobs, have different curl patterns. It’s rare to see these days, like finding a four leaf clover or snatching an open treadmill at the gym at 5pm.
My straight friend, Steven, likes to point at random women and ask if I find them attractive.“ What about her?” He points more aggressively.
“ Yeah, I see her,” I shove his finger away. He shows me videos of Megan Thee Stallion and tries to connect with me over her waist. Yet, I’m sure I have a type. At the gym, I can spot the butch with tattoos and glasses on the rowing machine across the way. I puff out my chest and shove up my tie dye t-shirt sleeves to reveal my soft shoulders as I fill my water bottle near where she’s working out.
The more I fixate on these familiar patterns, the more I realize how flimsy the idea of a“ type” really is. My girlfriend has taught me that type, while real, is just the hook that catches in my cheek, reeling me out of the pond. My girlfriend has brown eyes and wears overalls and is shorter than me. She is most definitely my type, yet, I don’t view her as Frankenstein so therefore I am no monster. Type starts to become irrelevant after a certain timestamp. It was after the fifth or sixth date, once I knew her best friend’s name and the time of night she got tired that her type started to disperse like fog. You don’t hear about couples who’ve been married for a decade talking about how their wife is just their type. Type, while real, expires.
So, as I sat, gazing into my ex’s face, confused and searching for an answer, I considered my options. She was technically still my type as well. I could have reached across the rickety table between us and told her,“ Let’s do this thing.” We could have booked an AirBnB in Burlington and brought her pet rabbit with us. Her girlfriend would cry for a moment, and then she would get over it. I could shake hands with Bernie Sanders and get the key to the city for I would have won the game. She’s just my type, after all. But contemplating her miraculously brown eyes I came to the relieving conclusion that she’d reached her expiration date.
We scanned one another once more, saving the others’ features into a file. I would save this knowledge and lodge it behind my ear. I’d scratch it every once in a while and then forget it was there. One day I’ll empty her file from my head completely.
She gave me a hug and said goodnight. She looked back before going down into the train station, back to her girlfriend at home using the same curl mousse I do. Her body became smaller, shrinking into the station, she became part of it.
