meraki.

The Villa

All Anna had known for the past week had been: troubled sleep. 

Since New Year's Eve, she hadn't been able to sleep a full night: she either woke up multiple times during the night, each time getting harder for her to go back to sleep, or found it hard to fall asleep at all. She didn't know which one was worse: the interrupted sleep was annoying, because she always woke up right when the sleep was starting to actually rest her; the difficulty to fall asleep at all kept her awake 'til the wee hours of the morning, then she got 3 hours of undisturbed sleep - which were always more than what she got when she kept waking up. 

She didn't know why her body was refusing sleep, unless it was extremely necessary for her to survive. Or, well, she did know why, she was just ignoring it for her own sake. 

It was always like that after she got a taste of what she used to be. After being starved for so long, getting even just a tiny little ounce of her past self was really dangerous: it kept her up at night, with memories flooding through her mind and the strong desire to have more, feel more, pour more out of her. Only problem was that it rarely happened. It had took her so long to even just muster that small amount of energy, and it had been wasted on... on that pathetic waste of a human being of... No. She didn't wanna think about it. 

She had done her best to not think about what had happened that night, both inside the Glitter clud and...outside of it. She had been so good at comprtamentalizing the events and storing them away in small drawers in her mind so she wouldn't have had to think about them anytime soon - or ever at all, for what she cared. 

She had no time to deal with that, not at that time. She had more important things to focus on: her dissertation, the publication of said dissertation, the internship she should've found for after the graduation were just some of the long-term goals she shoud've focused on. One of the short-term goals she should've focused on in that exact moment was: falling asleep. 

She let out a loud huff, crossing her arms over the comforter laying on her body. She craned her neck to look at the nightstand where her phone was resting, and after debating whether she should've got the phone or not, she huffed again, lifting one arm to take it. 

She unlocked it and squinted her eyes at the bright screen. 6:35am. 

She let the phone fall to her chest, rolling her eyes. That night she hadn't been able to fall asleep, once again. She stretched to put the phone back on the nightstand, plugging it in so it would've kept charging, and then fell back on the bed. 

She made the mistake of turning on her side, facing the wall. The small pang of pain that crossed her chest was short, but not that short that she didn't feel it. 

The other side of the bed was empty. 

Like it had been for the past week. 

Anna had locked Harry out of her room that first night, and he had slept on the couch - silently embracing the back pains that would've brought him in the morning. She had spent the first day of the year locked inside of her room, ignoring his attempts to start a conversation with her, his knocks on her door, the pain in his voice when he called her name, how small his voice had sounded the last time he had knocked, before giving up altogether, and telling her that he would've been available for her to talk to him about whatever had happened. Or not, he had added. 

And she had just... ignored him. 

To be more specific, she had ignored her existence the whole day, refusing to get out of her room or do anything at all. She didn't even eat anything.