Claire

Claire was a girl. A pretty girl. A girl who had pony tails and freckles and a somewhat concerning fascination with medieval interpretations of justice. At the end of each school day, she would walk home, as many girls did, in her fashionable outfits and shiny hair accessories attracting attention from all who ventured into her wake. She was the sort of girl that boys so badly wanted to stand next to and attempt to drum up the courage to ask out, with or without an actual drum, but once in her presence they were invariably reduced to monosyllabic words and utterances, of which she happened to be a big fan. And yet nothing ever transpired.

What those boys didn't know was that she was shy and lonely. Shy, lonely and creative despite her appearance which made her look a tad prehistoric. Her appearance was hard to read, as it greatly lacked any letters or words, though one pair of pants just screamed Shakespeare. How she would have loved to have been asked out, or in -"we wouldn't need to actually be outside!" she wanted to tell them all, but they were never all in the same place at the same time making the logistics of telling them all next to impossible.

Instead she would return home each day and, after completing her homework and vegetable peeling for hours even when her parents pleaded with her to stop with the peeling already until their throats grew hoarse, she would retreat to her room and spend hours and hours in a dreamworld of her own making though she had gone online for some ideas.

It was a world she had carefully constructed from the tall, pink skyscrapers down to the most minute details like the precise shape of the minute hand on the town clock, only stopping when her imaginary microscope reached the limits of its magnification. Her world would have been infinitely more exciting than reality aside from that being theoretically impossible. She generally struggled, at a young age, accurately quantifying and comparing the level of excitements at the best of times.

She loved every aspect of her world - her friends, the abundance of elephants, the relaxed rules about keeping library books past their due date. The only negative she could think of were the results of the most recent election, where she had somewhat surprisingly finished third even though she was the only candidate and had just completed what seemed like a vastly success mayoral campaign. She'd even handed out freshly-baked cookies.

Yet, despite her frequent drifting from reality, Claire was the stereotypical girl next door. She took great pride in her close relationship, and proximity, to doors. She was the girl everyone loved and admired for her next-to-impeccable posture, dripped wax creations and crocheting skills. The girl all of the other girls loved for her innocence, sense of comedic timing and endless supply of lined paper. The girl who bought into stereotypes as much as any girl could, going to extremes to act and appear as stereotypical as possible, only stopping due to time constraints. The girls loved her, and yet kept their distance, with each girl having their own, randomly assigned and self-regulated distance, because Claire seemed to want it that way.

Throughout the years she had always been the girl next door, except for a short period of time when her parents leased a houseboat and their only neighbours had been adventure and seasickness, as well as a particularly "frisky" family of sharks. There was also that other time when they had no neighbours as the house next to her parent's place was considered haunted, but it turned out the owners were just really into mood lighting and old sound effect records.

Families had come and go and she had watched them pack and unpack, only to repack eventually, after a period of time, though sometimes using newer and shinier suitcases. She had often wondered what had happened to the old pieces of luggage, but not enough to actually ask.

And there had always been boys living in the house next door to her. An almost never-ending turnstile full of boys just as her mother had randomly predicted before they had moved into the neighbourhood. Cute boys, muscular boys, nerdy boys and boys who turned out to just be hairy dogs which went a long way towards explaining why they crawled around on all fours so often and chose to bark aggressively and attempt to lick her leg whenever they saw her.

The boys next door were only a short distance and two front doors away and yet they seemed miles off. All they would have to do, the determined after months of research, is open their door, walk approximately 15 metres taking care to avoid trees, knock on her door and they could be together forever just like the Disney Princess movies she had watched as a kid and continued watching to this day, only with what could only be described as "rabid" attention to non-realistic character traits and deficiencies in the plot.

When not escaping to her room, she would sit on her front porch just waiting for one of these boys to make their move and sweep her off her feet, before placing her down as she wouldn't want them to hurt their backs. And yet they never did, aside from that one time she got in the way of one young man when he was aggressively sweeping his sidewalk due to an abundance of pine needles she had "accidentally" place on his yard as part of her convoluted dating plan.

At first she thought it had been fate, and that they were meant to be together forever, but she quickly realized that he had only been interested in the needles; really interested. A little too interested which, while raising a series of questions that, when answered, could form the backbone for an average-at-best Masters' thesis, was really a turn off.

Back in those days she spent lots of time walking in the tall grass in the field near her house collecting wild flowers and wondering what was holding her back from entering the world of dating as well as showing an equal appreciation for the "tame" flowers her parents grew in their backyard. Her parents' backyard was impressive and acted as sort of a sanctuary away from the sanctuary of her room, but she just couldn't get over its placement behind the house. Seemed weak.

As the years passed girlfriends started dating, becoming serious over time and then getting married and finally moving on to having ridiculous and sordid affairs all the while growing taller and needing new shoes. Claire felt envy, mostly due to their increased shoe sizes and backroom canoodling and a part of her wished to be part of that game, so she wouldn't feel left out, but another, more significant part of her didn't want to grow up.

She wished to remain a young girl for as long as she could and to avoid the myriad of complex emotional states that the women she knew were experiencing. Yes, she was jealous when she sat there observing weddings, and yes, the graphic and gasp-inducing details of these affairs left her titillated and nearly out of breath due to the excessive amount of gasping. She knew that overtime she'd build up more of an ability to gasp for longer periods of time, but that wasn't the point, even though that would be a welcome relief from her current inability to gasp more than a few times an hour. The point was that the affairs were exciting to hear about, even the ones that were politically risky or involved box after box of ruined chocolate cakes.

When the time seemed right, she had moved out of her parents' house. She couldn't believe the deal she had received from the moving company. That imbecile of a mover didn't even charge her extra for the imaginary world. She felt more adult-like now that she was renting a house near the university, and yet, she was still the girl next door.

This once desirable title had become a cross to bear, an anchor, a weighty metaphysical construct of which she was usually a big fan, except in this case as it forced her into therapy. She loved therapy, just not feeling forced to go, which she wasn't really and only said that to friends as her therapist had oddly suggested it as a necessary first step in their work together. It was the time in therapy where she would talk of her intricate dream world. The world she had first developed as a young girl and still escaped to on a regular basis when not studying, working or practicing revolutionary songs full of controversial political propaganda on her digital piano.

She told her therapist how she was jealous of her girlfriends and how badly she wanted to run out of this room, or whatever room she found herself in later today or next week sometime, as it was hard to predict exactly what room you would be in so far in advance, although she had a fairly good idea as there were limited rooms she usually entered on a week-to-week basis, but she wanted to keep an open mind at this point about the potential to enter new rooms and needed to move on with this thought before her 50 minute hour was up.

Yes, she wanted to leave a room and find the first eligible bachelor and marry him. She wanted to have a marriage full of love and passion and down comforters. She wanted to have a marriage full of stir fries, hanging baskets and shower gels. She wanted to have a marriage that she could sing about, engrave into oak trees and write home about even though she knew that her parents lived just around the block and sending a letter or postcard via the mail was infinitely slower than just dropping it into their mailbox herself on her way to work.

And she wanted to have an affair. It was hard for her to speak these words to anyone or anything. She even trembled when she started to formulate the first word of the thought about the desire to have an affair in her mind. People on the bus were clearly wondering what was up with the trembling woman with the smile on her face who was having troubles gasping.

The idea of an affair was so risque and out-of-character and embarrassingly-blush-producing-especially-due-to-the-fact-that-she-was-really-pale-and-easily-embarrassed-and-already-wearing-a-bordering-on-intimidating-amount-of-blush-thus-rendering-any-actual-blushing-hard-to-detect-but-she-knew. After years of "playing by the book" and "obeying all the rules" and "composting organics" she wanted to live on the edge and break free from this predictable, dependable and vanilla-eating-investing-her-money-in-low-risk-tax-free-savings-accounts woman she had grown up to be.

She had done her research and wanted to have affairs of all kinds: emotional affairs, opportunistic affairs, revenge affairs and ones that went out of their way to be impossibly hard to define or explain and may, in fact, not be affairs and just be a staff meeting or a mug of hot cocoa. But, she just couldn't and she felt trapped in her life and her imagination.

The world she had so innocently started all of those years ago as an escape, now felt more like a prison. Sure it was a country-club-style of prison where the inhabitants felt less like prisoners and more like they were at a spa with free, unlimited time with registered massage therapists as that was the only kind of prison her imagination could dream up due to her father's country club and registered massage therapy magazine subscriptions he had when she was a child.

Claire awoke each morning and had such a hard time telling dreams from reality. It used to be easy, but over time, it had become more and more challenging. Though she wanted to fix things and had weekly appointments with her therapist, her dream world was so comforting and no one, especially her, ever got hurt aside from that time she was viciously attacked by an imaginary wild bear who seemed to be immune to her playing dead.

Claire wanted to have an affair, but she just couldn't. Not now, not yet. One day, soon she hoped, she would figuratively tear down the walls of this world she had created and venture forth, head figuratively full of steam, into reality. She craved to be slapped in the face with all that reality had to offer as long as reality didn't have calloused hands. She was close to breaking out and she was so excited. Watch out eligible bachelors, here comes Claire!