Clairtje

In Dutch, Little Claire.
She just left, and waits even now for the #4 tram back to her father's. We ate two pizzas, like hermits, tucked away in my bedroom seated on a mattress in front of this very computer watching the final twenty minutes of Superbad, simply because we don't like my roommates, and can't stand to see or be seen by them. It's become one of those domestic situations that ripens and sours until greetings become monosyllabic and barely civil, dishes pile up, and the air becomes thick. Funny how that happens, that air thickening. It's palpable. I know it sounds trite, "The tension was palpable", but seriously, the goddamn tension is palpable. I live with five Dutch sorority girls, each pretty and ugly at the same time. One has great breasts, but she's 6'1 and took a wicked spill in the living room from which she cannot, in my mind, recover the grace her breasts used to afford her. Another smells, still another has those great Dutch breasts, but has the legs of a second baseman, and a good one at that. Their pros are outweighed by their cons. However, if I didn't have Claire this house would be one large regretful pitfall of sexual episodes for drunken Pat, each girl being a prime candidate for that deceptive enemy of the inebriated: The girl that approaches, but doesn't attain, beauty. Of course her failings, be they birthmarks, crooked teeth, or missing appendages (worst case scenario), are only apparent in the daylight, giving their true, ugly forms that vampiric quality that one cannot help but associate with the nearly attractive girl.
Yet Claire, truly, is a beauty. I've woken up beside her many times and haven't been thrown off by a thing. But she has her shortcomings, as do I, namely the gift, nay, the curse, of being able to recognize another's shortcomings all too well. Too bad. Will I ever be able to be with a girl for a long period of time without being consumed by her flaws? Maybe. You're almost the one Clairtje, but not quite.