you're too young & eager to love

Little bits of Claire. I was hoping for more.

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She is the type of woman who likes apples in her salad, organic field greens, and sweet goat cheese. Claire likes Journey. Novels baring the Oprah’s Book Club stamp of approval. She’s never considered herself wholesome, though she knows her wardrobe can be found in Nordstram’s and J. Crew. The fall of her honey-white hair, the lazy stretch of her cream body in a cashmere sweater. Her choice of white wines can be described as quaint. Her otherwise satisfactory life punctuated by anxiety attacks – minor challenges laced in the fear of aging, of the looming possibility of her uselessness.

The woman in the photograph (the one she finds – out of place amongst his sock drawer) doesn’t look like the type to suffer from anxiety. Instead, she looks like a woman easily liked and immediately untrustworthy. The way she has been caught, laughing, frozen in a moment of happiness, makes Claire’s stomach tighten. She has laughed like that before, but it has been some time (more than two months). The angle of the photograph betrays the not-complete shadow, the sharp corner of a man’s jaw in the edge of the rectangular print.

Her nails look very coral against the picture. Her hands do not shake.




“Do you love me?” It sounds like a weak question despite the stability of her voice. Her husband brushes her hair away from her face, smooths it behind her ear. The diamond studs he bought her for their third wedding anniversary collect the moonlight.

“I married you, didn’t I?” That touch of amusement in his voice. The way he answers a question with a question. Claire kisses him and thinks she tastes lipstick – a plum-based shade, the type of color she would never wear.




After he leaves for work, Claire walks the fifteen steps of stairs to their shared bedrom. She has left the windows open, and the sunlight streams in, hazy in the mid-morning. The air feels damp. She has been doing this for a week now, making habit of the routine, circling the bedroom as though she is a stranger. There is the most peculiar feeling of guilt in her chest every time she removes the picture, every time she sits on the edge of the bed to stare, unhurriedly, at the nameless woman. Claire is not secretive. Secrets, like lies, taste bitter in her mouth. It is a bitterness she is becoming acquainted with.

She looks like a child. Not a day past fifteen. Stream-lined and petite. A rabbit’s mouth and hair that is more of a halo than a mane. A type of fairy more befitted by giggling than laughing.

The differences become painfully astounding.