Blogs

All my life I've been undressing in front of a window.

Every undone latch, pinned-back curtain and vein of blind exposing just enough of my ivory walled bedroom that I could believe I was giving a peep show to an audience devised entirely of my own imagination. I've spent enough of my days staring out the same windows to logically know that no one is looking back in, but even that couldn't deter me from my performing. The show must go on! A little nip-slip here, a butt-cheek there. Under the roof my parents proudly pay rent for, it's truly my right to perform a theatric half-nude dance number whilst protected by a curtain of glass. And when quarantine ensued last month, things have only accelerated.

I blame television. Not the romantic scenes fromSleepover,the movie where Julie Corkey stares up at Steve Phillips in his bath towel, orThe Ugly Truthwhere Katherine Heigl falls out of her tree while gawking at a man freshly out of the shower, but rather Joe Goldberg from Netflix'sYou. Before you argue that he's a Ted Bundy-type-sociopath with murderous intentions, think of how fantastic it would be to have a Penn-Badgley-hot aficionado to bear the load of narrating your life. Gone are the days of having to focus so hard on what someone lusting over you would scrawl on a love letter. Instead, his deep voice booms flowery poems of the hairbrush separating strands of your silky ash-colored hair from the luxury of your own room. For a second, you blissfully close your eyes. You've become a character in a romance novel.

Am I saying that I want to be stalked? Absolutely, though I'll never fantasize about placing restraining orders, I'm no psychopath. I'm simply seeking an audience for my every calculated move. Think more along the lines ofThe Truman Show, except I'm in on the gag.

Seeing as the collective modern world has since been placed on house arrest, I'm left drumming up fantasies of my adjacent neighbors pining over which coffee creamer I choose. "I see she's going with the French vanilla," they say. "Must be a stressful day." I twirl my hair and stand on my tiptoes, tossing them a bone and offering the perfect view into my fishbowl apartment. "Is she washing her bangs in the sink again?" They shake their heads before raising a piece of paper with 'you okay?' written in sharpie. I commend them for their Taylor Swift reference.

I'm aware that this is narcissistic, you needn't remind me. But what's a girl to do in quarantine but scribble and entertain hypotheticals? As Dolly Alderton, author of her memoir Everything I Know About Love, said, "I'm always half in life, half in a fantastical version of it inside my head."

At least my narratives are unproblematic love interests as opposed to the economic destruction of society as we know it. And sure, it all just exists in my head, but now, doesn't it also exist in yours?

- Scout Petersen

Scout Petersen is a recent graduate from the College of Charleston, where she majored in English with a concentration in creative writing. She has a passion for roasting herself and finding comedy in the mundane. Her fiction has been featured in Riprap Journal of California State University at Long Beach, as well as on her mother's fridge.