Madeleine

“There are these moments I come back to when I’m at my most nostalgic, when all I want to do is curl up in the past with Sam. I can play them in my mind as if they’re old home videos. I used to watch them all the time in university, a bedtime routine as familiar as the pilled Hudson’s Bay blanket I’d taken from the cottage. But the memories and the regrets they carried with them chafed like the blanket’s wool, and I would lose nights imagining where Sam was at that precise moment, wondering if there’s a chance he might be thinking of me. Sometimes I felt sure he was—like there was an invisible, unbreakable string that ran between us, stretching vast distances and keeping us joined. Other times, I dozed off in the midst of a movie only to wake in the middle of the night, my lungs feeling like they were on the verge of collapse, and I’d have to breathe my way through the panic attack.”
― Carley Fortune, Every Summer After