It Was Evident Based Off Recent Events. I Bit My Lip and Counted My Losses. – Evelyn Patneaude

February 1, 2026

I was fourteen pages deep into my eBay search for “Plaid Hollister Mini Skirt” when I found her.

It was her thin, long legs in the main image that first caught my attention. They were reflective and beige and maintained reasonable distance between each other. That’s what got me to click—but it was her shining smile and long, frizzy brown hair in the following image that kept it.

I couldn’t get over it, the idea that someone would think to use a full-sized image of themselves, face included, when selling a skirt. I wondered what kind of girl that might be, the kind to do something like that.

I shot her a message:

Hey, is this skirt more yellow or more green in person? It’s sort of hard to tell from the lighting in the image.

And I clicked off the computer monitor and deflated into my seat. I decided I had to clear my mind.

I headed out the door and made for nowhere in particular. I paced the grimy sidewalks, not stopping for a moment to shoot any looks at all the tiny domestic warfares of the families or couples, nor to spare my pocket change to whatever crispy-skinned beggar was moaning my way from his or her dry mouth.

It all seemed so inconsequential, none of it tangible, nothing except for my eBay girl. eBay girl, stunning and sweet and sitting by my side, crossing a pair of parenthetically-shaped legs.

I wandered until the day had nearly worn itself out, until both the sky and my hands were shifting to a pale blue, and then I retired to my room for the evening.

Only forty-eight minutes after the initial message had been sent, it turned out I had received my reply:

It’s definitely more yellow. There’s some chartreuse in the plaid pattern, but the base is 100% yellow.

I felt lightheaded and feverish. It was like she had reached her hands through the monitor and clenched them around my heart and wrung out all the juices.

For several days, I kept up the momentum. I asked about anything I could—if the measurements were taken flat, if she knew the manufacturing year or the percentages in the fabric blend, if it was machine or hand wash, just about anything I could think of. To my surprise, she did her best to answer everything.

(13.5” waist, flat. She didn’t know for sure, but would guess 2014. 100% cotton, surprisingly. Machine wash okay.)

Then, I asked her how her day was going.

Hmmm…I’m doing good Lol. How are you?

And then I really met her, in real life, and I liked a whole lot more than her legs. I liked the way she gripped her pen like a child when she wrote, the way she played with her earring backs and downed her drinks when she was feeling shy, the way she twirled wispy strands of hair round her finger when she thought hard.

When I got to know her even better, I realized that when I really liked her best was right before bedtime, when her face was sticky from the layer of Vaseline she had slathered on to seal in the subterranean skin products; when she’d curl up and lay her head down on my chest and a good amount of the Vaseline would wind up on my shirt or my cheek, and we’d kiss and our lips would just kind of slide across each other’s.

I hated the feeling, and she knew this, so every time she’d pull away with the wildest grin.

Then she’d splay her body out on my bed and tell me everything—about dreams and ideas and her shifting worldviews and her life and her family and the future and what it was supposedly all about. I always played a good ear, even when I didn’t understand what she meant by any of it, even when I just wanted some sleep.

She could be juvenile in ways that I never agreed with but that I promised to forever tolerate. Always changing her mind or her life’s plan, always acting out, always pushing the plate away, always making me hold my breath. So unpredictable, so volatile, genius. I tore out hairs and clenched my jaw whenever the thought of no longer having her felt like an actual possibility.

And then it did end, and I was ripping off pieces of myself and distributing them accordingly to whatever few people I could. I was giving some things to some people but never anyone the whole truth, never in plain words just saying what had happened or the man I was. Leaving something vague or open to interpretation, having an out or an in, a door left slightly cracked.
“Yeah, this girl’s got me down,” I told my little brother, “I’ll be alright though.”

The bottle of ten-dollar champagne which had been alternating between the two of us made its way back to my hand.

“That’s all,” he said, “You kill it.”

That’s the furthest I’m going to get, I thought to myself as I wrapped my lips around the opening. I tilted the thing upside down and emptied its artificial green apple taste into my mouth.

One night when it was just me in the bed, I imagined my eBay girl there beside me, staring up at the ceiling in my nearly black room, carefully exhaling her winding river of thoughts. She would be greyed out, like she had been peeled directly from a black and white film, her body lit from the exposed window behind us. She would be half-nude and half-dreaming.
And through all that she expressed she would be begging me, begging me for something, anything please, a grain of truth or honesty, or something raw and soft that came straight from within, to which I would offer her nothing.

Only alone can I form the words, and even then, it’s not out loud in front of the mirror. It’s just something that I scribble on pieces of scrap paper, pieces to be later tossed in the bin or the fireplace, or run under the kitchen faucet, where I stand and watch the pen marks bleed and wash away into Rorschach shapes:
I spent my free time browsing things on eBay, girls’ things, because I wanted to see girls. I wanted to meet girls. I met a girl from eBay. She was first beautiful and later special, and though it began as another one of my temptations, I admit, it ended up a real love. Truly, in the fullest sense of the word. It was a real and true love.

If it weren’t for her I would’ve never dreamt in the first place, I would’ve used an entire human life on being at work or in front of the computer; any semblance of a vision would’ve remained something far-off, in the top-right corner of my mind, blurred and underdeveloped, as if looking at it through an ultrasound scan.

I was utterly terrified that she’d find out I was vacant, that without her I was destined for acquiescent life, and so I never gave away any part of me, not any that would’ve mattered.

Immediately after she left for the last time, I got up to circle my dirty streets without direction. It was early spring.
Maybe she would’ve “loved me for the real me.” I wondered. I stepped outside and it was the nicest day of the year so far.

I was drifting along. I was passing through. I was an observer, taking in my surroundings. I noted it was quiet. I eavesdropped on chirping birds.

Would she “love me for the real me?”

Crumpled up on a stoop beside me was a toothy homeless woman, high and fugue and nestled atop some flattened boxes of breakfast cereal.

I didn’t think so then, and either way I’ll never know.