Finding Gilbert Blythe

August 2013

Ridley grunts as she shifts the last of the brown boxes out of the closet and into her bedroom, which is now filled with several other boxes that contain much of her old (and somewhat useless) possessions that she'd left behind when she went to Uni. When Marcy moved into this new flat, she'd put all of the brown boxes into the musty old closet in Ridley's new room and hadn't touched them since then. And now, Ridley has spent the majority of the last hour pushing the (weirdly) heavy boxes out of the closet to sift through them and find anything useless that she supposes she'll have to give away to charity or just throw away.

She sits down with a thump and slides across the floor to the box closest to her and begins to open it. The first box contains nothing but really old, and god awfully ugly old clothes; she cringes as she puts them into two piles: Give Away and Throw Away, but most of the clothes end up in the Throw Away pile, because she can't imagine who would ever want their children going through the trauma of walking around in those rags.

After going through more trashy clothes, old socks with holes in them, half-hearted birthday cards from one or two people she'd reluctantly made friends with in secondary school and lost contact with years ago, old packets of crisps and scraps of paper with maths sums scribbled on them Ridley comes to the conclusion that none of these boxes contain anything worth giving away and is just about to give up digging into the (Fourth? Fifth?) box when she finds a thick notebook with pink and yellow post-it notes sticking out from random little pages. Ridley narrows her eyes and pulls the notebook out of the box, not understanding what it is and how it ended up here.

Ridley begins to flick through the pages of the notebook and starts to giggle as the realization dawns on her that this was the notebook in which she wrote all her stories, short little drabbles or quick little notes about possible plot ideas - it's completely filled with her messy, slightly cursive handwriting. It's useless, this little thing. She'd given up on writing so long ago, when her stupid 'Nobody's Juliet' story had been rejected and Ridley can even vaguely remember shoving this notebook under a pile of clothes in her cupboard vowing firmly that she would never set her eyes on it ever again.

Ridley draws the notebook close to her chest and she smiles to herself. It seemed like such a long time ago, it seemed like the end of the world to her back then-getting a story rejected- but now it's just a memory that she can laugh at. The sting of rejection isn't even there anymore. Heck, she'd even forgotten she wrote that silly, nonsensical little story.

After looking around for awhile, she even finds the original manuscript that she had sent to the magazine all those years ago and after a quick read of the story, she decides that it's become one of the most useful rejections in her life.

The story makes her realize how right Ben is about her. It was a cliché. It was unrealistic. Her characters were flat, not relatable. Despite all its flaws, Ridley realizes that this was the sort of romance she wanted in her own life back then and maybe even now-she had dreamed of her own Gilbert Blythe for years but she had unintentionally morphed her vision of Gilbert Blythe into another Roy Gardner. A perfect version of Gilbert Blythe that simply does not exist.

Suddenly, something in the corner of her mind sets off, like an alarm clock in the morning, and it sends a thrill down her entire body, from the very top of her head to the tip of her toes and it's that corner of her mind that hasn't been used in a long time but oh, what does it matter now? Ridley gives an excited little squeal and rushes to her laptop which has been carelessly thrown on to her bed.

With trembling fingers and a heart that is thumping far too loudly for her to hear her own thoughts, she logs into her old WritersWrite account on the internet. Oh thank god she remembers the password! With a snort, she deletes all the old short stories she has published (and thankfully, no one has bothered to read) and clicks the 'New story' option. A blank page pops up and she moves her cursor to the top and clicks on the part where it says 'Title Your Story!' and begins to type: Finding Gilbert Blythe.