EXTRACT
Happy Friday!! Here's a snippet from something I'm working on that I need inspiration to finish.... set post 10x11!
It’s official, Sylvie thinks as she shuts off her phone and puts it face down on the pillow next to her. She’s scrolled to the end of Instagram and back again.
She sighs, turns on her side and tries to get comfortable. She closes her eyes too, hoping if she squeezes them tight enough her brain will turn off.
It doesn’t.
She sighs again, flips over onto her back, tapping her hands against the sheets.
Usually after she gets off shift, she has a quiet day, maybe getting groceries on the way home, mostly content just to pad around in sweats, decompressing.
Today, though, she felt restless, couldn’t settle. She’d even gone for a run despite the chill, feeling some nervous energy she wanted to burn off but couldn’t no matter how fast she went. She’d felt something in her mind that she wanted to clear out, the shape of it not clear, but the weight of it taking up space. Even that didn’t help and she couldn’t shake it off so she went home, a glass of wine calling her name.
An hour later and on her second glass, she told herself she felt better, head clearer.
(She ignored two of Matt’s calls, messaged him and said she’d call him later).
And she does feel better, she tells herself now. She didn’t exactly feel bad before. There’s no good reason why she can’t sleep.
(Except, yesterday: “my hope for you? That you get as much time as possible with Matt”).
Sylvie turns over her phone again, clicks on photos, swipes through her most recent, Amelia’s smiling face the main feature in all of them.
Swiping back further, she gets to the pictures from her weekend with Matt and the boys, Griffin’s birthday party at the Mexican place they love. Ben had sent her a really sweet candid he’d taken of her and Matt that neither of them knew was happening, his arm around her shoulder, hers around his waist and him looking down at her with these soft eyes she loves to sink into.
It was kind of amazing and somehow totally unsurprising to her that every time they saw each other, they slipped right back into how they were before.
Ugh. She feels that sharp familiar prick of pain when she thinks about it, how much she misses him, how much she wishes they were together all the time like they were in the summer, rather than these few days here and there.
For the first couple of months he was gone, when she was alone in the dark, she wished he was with her, in her apartment, in her bed, pressed against her back, arm slung over there the way they’d spent so many nights, the weight of him beside her pulling her into him.
Then after she’d visited him and the boys a couple of times, she began to imagine his life there, actually wanted him to be happy, build new relationships, enjoy his new life. And she knew he still wanted her to move there with him; he’d made it clear to her so many times that she just had to say the word and she could be there whenever she wanted.
But she’d resisted, that little voice in her head telling her not to make the same mistake all over again, to stick with her program and achieve it, not make another half baked decision because of some guy.
But Matt isn’t just some guy. Hasn’t ever been to her, not really. And the more time passes, the more she feels that pull towards him, the missing him becoming more than she can handle.
(The thing she feels, that weight, that pressure on her? She knows what it is really. She can’t lie to herself and say she hasn’t pictured her stuff lined up with his in his bathroom in Portland, her clothes and his mixed in the wardrobe she told him to buy. She thinks about it more with each day that passes.)
Sighing deeply, she pops in an AirPod, flicks to a sleep playlist Violet recommended to her. Closes her eyes again and pretends it’ll send her into a deep sleep.