Gemma Longreach

Gemma Longreach is a young giraffe woman standing a little over seven and a half feet tall, which is approximately the height at which strangers stop asking how tall you are and simply announce their estimate instead. Gemma has heard them all. Yes, she's tall. Yes, she can reach that for you. No, she did not play basketball. And if you ask how the weather is up there, she will politely inform you that it's lovely.

Gemma works a steady office job and rather likes it. She's organized, dependable, good with people, and perfectly content with work being one part of her life rather than the defining feature of it. Her height creates the predictable assortment of workplace inconveniences, including desks, chairs, doorframes, conference-room lighting, and coworkers who discover that the top of a filing cabinet is not actually a private storage area when Gemma can see directly onto it.

Outside work, she's considerably more active than her quiet demeanor suggests. Gemma cycles, hikes, plays squash, and spends a great deal of time outdoors whenever the weather cooperates. She also reads voraciously and is perfectly happy losing an evening to a book. On walks, she has an absent-minded habit of browsing leaves from trees and shrubs as she passes, particularly maple, sometimes realizing only afterward that the person beside her has stopped talking and is watching. Gemma considers this unfair. Nobody stares when humans grab a handful of trail mix.

Being unusually tall requires a certain amount of planning. Clothes are difficult, shoes are worse, low ceilings demand vigilance, and buying a car involves considerably more sitting in dealerships than she'd prefer. Gemma handles most of it with patience and dry humor. What bothers her more is the assumption that her size must dominate her personality. She doesn't particularly want to be “the tall one” in every room, even if she is, objectively and somewhat inconveniently, the tall one in almost every room.

Thoughtful, patient, and quietly witty, Gemma is happiest when life isn't making a production out of her. She likes good books, long bike rides, comfortable routines, and friends who stopped noticing her height years ago. 🦒