When I met Julia Fishwell, I was trying out a lot of different deodorants. A fungal infection had left my armpit skin itchy and brittle. The Old Spice I’d used since puberty was too harsh. All the new ones too. Every week I smelled like a different person.
Julia stared straight at me from behind the drug store counter. “You don’t want this one.” She swept my hypoallergenic stick from the conveyor to clatter against other rejections in a basket at her feet. She rapped the counter like I was a distractable pet. “I’ll be right back.”
She stepped from the register and split a line of customers, quickly returning from the back with a small pink toothpaste-like tube. The label had a stenciled rose and was printed in Japanese on one side and English on the other
“You want this one,” she said, and rang it up.
I used that deodorant for a long time.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I bummed a smoke and her match caught my sweater sleeve. She apologized and helped me put it out in her Solo cup of wine. Then she lit the other sleeve on fire, to make it even.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I was lying on a couch drinking a Mr. Pibb and staring dumbly at the fluorescent lamps fifty feet overhead. My feet rested on a laminated price tag on the far arm of the couch. I wanted to be included in the sale. I didn’t want to go to fourth period English.
A set of booted footsteps trucked towards me on the linoleum. I looked over blearily. A long clean face split the ceiling’s fluorescents into clustered moons orbiting a soft nose.
“Hey. You come here too?” Julia Fishwell asked me.
“No,” I said. I only spent my lunch period at Furnish Depot when I was feeling an off-brand flavor of alone. I didn’t make a particular habit of it.
I turned my head back to the ceiling, crusty corduroy scratching my neck.
A throw pillow struck me in the cheek. “You come here now,” she said through laughter.
When I turned over she was clawing another pillow. I raised my arms in front of my face and held down a smile.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I was TAing a class on mycelia and she was in the first row. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was attractive, but that wasn’t why, or at least it wasn’t only why. She felt obscurely familiar, like a poorly prepared family recipe. After the lecture I asked my professor for a class roster, then cross-referenced it with social media until I found Julia Fishwell’s profile.
I saw that she had emailed me six months ago asking for advice on a research paper.
I typed out a lengthy reply, deleted it, and opened Tinder.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I was madly in love with someone who looked exactly like Julia Fishwell. She sat next to me on the bus into campus and I had to tell her. We were the only ones on the 17 at that hour, unless you count the firs leaning over the street and scraping the rearview mirrors.
“Isn’t it uncanny?” I asked, showing her my crush’s latest selfie.
“Um, I would never wear corduroy,” she said, and scooched away from my outstretched phone.
I blushed and hunched back into my seat.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, we played gin rummy on the train from Amsterdam to Tallin. I couldn’t believe she beat me, the bitch. I poked a hole in her raspberry danish, and loudly corrected her Dutch when she ordered another.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, we went to a new cafe that smelled like cinnamon and Windex. Our old cafe had closed. Black mold or something.
I was scribbling in one of my notebooks as usual. She sat across from me doodling until her tea was cold and it was time for her to be early to her ceramics class.
As she split from the café like a knife from a watermelon, she left a note in front of me on a little slice of pink stationary. It began: “Good luck! One day I’ll blackmail you into finally letting me read your poetry.”
I had told her I was working on a poem. Really I was sketching out a plan for my employer’s taxes. Well, to help my employer evade his taxes. Well, to help his employer’s employer’s employer evade his taxes, in exchange for a research grant.
I lost that note for years. I found it in my pocket again on the same day I heard Julia Fishwell died.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, she set a pack of gum and a can of Benjamin Moore on the Lumber Place counter. Then she handed me a greasy brown bag that rattled like nails. “There’s ten bucks in there,” she said. “Keep the change and take it to the laundromat.”
I sighed and started stacking the quarters in piles of four.
“Someone threw all of those at me through my bedroom window, can you believe that?”
“That’s awful,” I said. “Would you like a receipt?”
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I was trying to mind my own business. I had just gotten off work and I was giving myself hemorrhoids on an awful wrought iron patio chair, drinking a Rainier and thinking really hard about my future. And here some vague lady bundled in a big coat was standing over me and splitting my sunlight like an ominous oak, staring straight through the window into the bar. I told her I was just trying to sit there in peace, did she mind? Could she even hear me?
Suddenly she stabbed through the door and yelled something about loving something or hating someone, I don’t really remember. I was behind in my mindfulness journal.
I think maybe I saw her crying outside as I left the bar, but that might have been someone else.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I was having a nightmare about a buffet full of my unfinished projects. Everyone was using these big brass tongs to load up their plates with discarded spore prints, ambitious sketches, scraps of field reports, unwritten birthday cards. Julia walked up and offered me a plate.
“Raw bars are in right now,” she said. “But I always go too hard on the shrimp.”
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I was telling everyone at recess I wanted to learn to puke on command so I could get out of class. So she took me to the ditch next to the playground and told me how. Then she told me I was a sissy when I couldn’t get my fingers all the way back there. She offered to do it for me, but I said that wouldn’t work in class because it would be obvious that we were faking. And I didn’t want to be a sissy so I clenched my gut and balled my left fist and jammed my right finger back there and sure enough, I hurled onto the birch twigs and Lays wrappers floating in the mud.
We talked for a while after that, past when recess was supposed to have ended. I gave her my house’s phone number on a pink Post-It note, but she must have lost it.
My family transferred to a different school district soon after. We moved to escape a super rare and toxic fungus in the walls of our house. None of us could stop throwing up.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, we’d been dating for six months. I thought I had known her, or someone just like her, most of my life. We were rearranging the furniture in her living room.
Then she reached down to fluff a pillow and told me something about a Furnish Depot and about feeling trapped inside herself that made me realize I was only just meeting her, in that moment. And I realized that I would meet her for the first time like this again, and again, and each time she would be a more intricate and alien creature with less of a shape and more of a smell. This could have been the moment when I fell in love with her but instead the swirling swarm of odors ahead nauseated me. I burst into tears and told her everything. And then she told me everything.
We marveled at how much we had managed to know so little about, and for so long. We agreed that the sofa would never fit there in that corner.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I was sucking wine from a water bottle and spilling lilies from a wine bottle on the way to her grave. Light was purpling out of the sky fast. I almost tripped on her little black headstone. The plastic bottle crinkled in my hand and the wine splashed up and back, all over my corduroy jacket.
I left all the lilies with Julia and went home. I’d meant to bring half the flowers to my girlfriend’s New Year’s Eve party, but if I went I knew I would just be thinking about Julia the whole time. I didn’t want to have to explain my mood to anyone there.
But I needed a better excuse than my mood, so when I got home I texted my girlfriend that I couldn’t make it, our pet frog was missing. Then I picked him up gently by his sweaty thumbs and I chucked him out the window. At the party, she hooked up with my cousin, who is hot but uses AI to forge local art.
We confessed to each other on New Year’s Day. If I had gone to the party, I’m sure I would have caught them together and left her on the spot. Instead, we got the chance to explain ourselves. The way my lonesomeness smelled like puke and fake roses, hers like mustard and old linen. We’re married now, and we have a new frog named Julia Fishwell.
I like to bring the original Julia Fishwell flowers from time to time, and imagine what kind of person she might have been, and how I might have known her differently.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I was flying from Seattle to Boise. My seat was next to hers, and she was one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen. When I sat down, our knees kissed.
She said I’m sorry and I said You’re good. For the rest of the flight, we did not speak.
We passed through a cloud. Droplets of water huddled onto the window next to her and then flung themselves off into the night, huddled and flung, huddled and flung.
***
When I met Julia Fishwell, I passed her on the street. She gave me a rocky smile, but I swear it softened at the end.