she’s my priestess, i’m your priest

slowly, she got better. it took time and it took you telling her, once, that the silence made your brain do things. once she did, her messages became unbearably tender. tiny updates throughout the day, pictures of things that reminded her of you, half-finished thoughts sent at three in the morning because she suddenly missed you too much to stay quiet about it.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie treats facetime like the sacred thing it is. there are loose scheduled times that you two try to keep but honestly it just happens whenever it happens. she'll be deep in research at midnight, papers spread everywhere, and you'll call because you just got off your shift and she'll always answer immediately, without hesitation. sometimes you two talk for hours. sometimes you two just exist together on screen. her at her desk, you wherever you are, neither of you saying much. just there, present. it's more than enough.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has fallen asleep during your calls more than once and this embarrasses her deeply. you have a collection of pictures and screenshots, evidence of her sleeping like a log. one of them has her drooling slightly on her notes. the irony is, you're statistically the more frequent offender; you've fallen asleep on call more times than either of you can count, but ellie's cases are documented and that's what matters. she has pretended, every single time, that it didn't happen. you have let her have this because you sense her embarrassment.

͙͘͡★ will watch you do your skincare routine with her chin in her hand and not say a single word. you prop your phone up against the mirror and just talk, rambling about your day, about your students, about whatever is happening in your busy head at eleven pm. she listens and watches carefully every single time. something about the domesticity of it does something to her that she couldn't name even if she tried.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who sometimes plays guitar on call because you ask her. at first, she refused but you asked again and then asked again after that. she caved eventually and now it's a thing. her, her guitar in her lap, her phone propped somewhere nearby, playing quietly while you listen. if she's feeling particularly daring she'll even sing a little, just a bit. she acts embarrassed every time, but she's not that embarrassed anymore. she loves it and she loves that you love it.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who secretly saves every photo you send her, every single one. selfies, coffee pictures, random screenshots, your classroom decorations, your dog, your lunch. it doesn’t matter. her camera roll is basically just evidence that she’s deeply in love with you.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie never gets used to missing you, but also never stops feeling grateful that she gets to. missing you means that she gets to love you and to her that’s worth every ache.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie struggles with the distance more than you do, even if she doesn’t always know how to say it. she isn’t clingy exactly, but she needs and craves closeness. she just feels the distance differently than you do. you miss her terribly but you can hold yourself together with words, the connection sustains you as long as it's there.

ellie needs the words and the physical. she doesn't need much, she just needs something. kissing your temple while passing behind you in the kitchen, feeling your fingers play with the baby hairs at the back of her neck, you, specifically, scratching slow circles between her shoulder blades... she especially misses all the tiny unconscious intimacy.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who genuinely cannot believe she’s dating you, like actually. sometimes she’ll just look at you and think what the fuck. the prettiest girl she’s ever seen is talking to her... willingly. that's crazy.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie gets sent a lot of pictures per week of your newest coffee creations. little foam flowers, hearts, leaves... one time, somehow, an actual swan. most of these look a little curious but that's okay.

ellie 🦕

oh i know that coffee is fire

you

you don’t even like coffee so how would you know...

ellie 🦕

the barista is gay as hell so i know actually

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie especially loves when your hands are visible in the photos you send her. when she can see your rings, the chipped red nail polish, the little ink stains you get from correcting papers. sometimes there’s glitter stuck to the side of your hand from classroom crafts or faint marker smudges near your wrist. all these tiny traces of your life she’s grown so painfully fond of. tiny fragments of a life she wishes she was standing inside of instead of only witnessing through pictures on her phone.

she stares at those pictures longer than she means to because she misses your hands terribly. misses the feeling of them in her hair, your fingers softly tracing shapes against her arm while talking or the outline of her tattoo, misses holding your hand while walking somewhere with no rush to get there.

sometimes she catches herself staring at a picture and thinking how badly she wants to hold your hands again. not even for long, just once.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie thinks you’re beautiful in a way that actually disorients her a little. especially because you’re not just hot — you’re sweet. she does think that you’re the hottest person alive but also the sweetest. and somehow the combination completely ruins her. because okay yeah your tits are incredible but you also remember little things she says in passing and send her voice notes when you walk home and talk about your kids so lovingly and suddenly she’s sitting there like damn... i’m doomed.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who sends you bouquets of flowers quite frequently. she found a flower shop near your house and even though they didn't do house deliveries, she got them to do it somehow. the florist on the other end of that call was charmed within thirty seconds when ellie first called and agreed to deliver a bouquet to your house.

it started because you had a terrible week. like genuinely awful — double shift at the café, a difficult class, one of your kids was having a hard time and it was breaking your heart, and you mentioned it to ellie scattered across three different conversations that she was paying close attention to even when she didn't say much.

the flowers arrived next day. you just got home from your classes when your mom called you to the door and there it was, a bouquet of pink flowers with a little card.

"you're doing really good. i mean it. - e"

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie after that, it becomes a thing, though not on a schedule. it just happens when it happens, which somehow makes it more devastating each time because you never see it coming. tucked between the stems there’s always a tiny little note. in it it's not her handwriting, but definitely her words.

"obviously. you studied for two weeks straight. - e"

“i kissed you in my thoughts did you felt it... -e"

"that bus driver will go to hell. -e"

"i beleaf in you -e"

“for my favorite teacher ♡ -e"

"you're worth every mile between us. -e"

“sometimes i think the universe made you specifically for me. like okay. pretty girl who smells like coffee and oranges and kisses me softly. alright man. - e”

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie once opened tiktok late at night and got one of those tarot readings that are now flooding her fyp thanks to you. the woman in the video was saying something like "YOUR PERSON IS A STUBBORN FIRE SIGN WHO MISSES YOU EVERY NIGHT. YOU WILL BE SOON TOGETHER ONCE AGAIN." she was already prepared to scroll past it but she opened the comments and noticed your profile picture in the comments, dead serious:

"i claim this energy ✨🧿"

she laughed so hard she had to put her phone down for a second. still, she found the whole thing weirdly endearing... it was just so painfully you. romantic and earnest without embarrassment. you love things wholeheartedly and openly in a way ellie still still isn't fully used to.

okay, maybe the universe is speaking directly to her girlfriend through tiktok tarot readings. WHO is she to judge.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie teases you relentlessly for your tarot habits but also listens with complete seriousness whenever you start explaining them. she'll sit there nodding while you talk about crystals and energies and card pulls like you're presenting groundbreaking scientific research.

sometimes, she'll pretend to be skeptical just to hear you defend it harder. she even lets you do readings for her and acts deeply unimpressed about it. "this is bullshit.... okay, pull another card though."

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is incapable of saying goodnight first, you've noticed. no matter how tired she is, no matter what time it is, ellie will not be the one to end the conversation. you have to do it every single time, and even then she always sends one more thing after just in case.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie misses your country’s summers so much it physically pains her, even though she spent the entire time complaining. she genuinely hated it. your room had no AC, only that loud ass fan that sounded like a plane preparing for takeoff and barely helped at all. secretly, she loved feeling your skin warm and sticky against hers. both of you were always too overheated to fully cuddle but still found a way to touch each other somehow; a leg thrown over hers, your fingers sleepily scratching her stomach, her face tucked into your chest at 3am while the fan rattled violently in the background...

she complained about it and yet, she would give anything to be back in your bedroom right now. she misses those horrible sweaty nights more than she can explain once she’s back in jackson.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie randomly sends you songs, and you do the same. it's like another form of communication at this point.

ellie’s are usually late night sends with absolutely zero context. just a link, no caption. just the song and the implication that she heard something and thought of you or thought of herself or thought of the two of you and couldn't not send it.

you send her songs too, even though your music taste is a tad different than hers. she listens to every single song carefully because a song you love is information about you and she wants all the information about you she can get.

your contributions to this arrangement include playlists with titles like songs to kiss me to when you see me again and, inexplicably (or not so inexplicably if she thinks about it), multiple tracks from the shrek soundtrack.

you

this is the greatest song of all time

ellie 🦕

disespectfully i disagree

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie cannot, under any circumstances, maintain a single linear conversation and neither can you. this is a ongoing issue. you will be mid-sentence about something important and one of you will say something that reminds the other of something completely unrelated and suddenly you're three topics deep with no map back. many important conversations have been lost this way. every discussion becomes like ten different discussions stitched together badly.

the solution you implemented, after one too many "wait what were we talking about" moments was the parentheses system because otherwise neither of you would ever finish a story.

you say parentheses out loud and whatever comes after is a detour. you're allowed to go as far off road as you want but when you close the parentheses, you go back, no exceptions. and it works! you actually finish conversations now... occasionally.

both of you say the word “parentheses” out loud constantly because both your brains work at the speed of light apparently.

“PARENTHESES. did i tell you dina and jesse are dating again?"

“okay so my professor said— wait, parentheses. remind me to tell you what happened at the café afterwards.”

of course, you forget to close the parentheses half the time anyway. you absolutely enable each other’s tangents too, neither of you are helping the situation AT ALL.

͙͘͡★ the issue now is nested parentheses, which happen constantly and were not accounted for in the original system design.

"so the kid did the funniest thing— PARENTHESES this reminds me of what you said about the museum tours— PARENTHESES wait that also reminds me of— okay i have THREE parentheses open right now."

"well, close them in order?"

"i don't remember what order i opened them in."

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie actually loves listening to your brain jump around topics though. loves seeing how excited you get when you remember something halfway through another sentence. she thinks it’s very cute!

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie gets sent approximately eight hundred tiktoks per day. genuinely an alarming amount considering you are both busy adults... you send her tiktoks like you're being PAID per video sent. ellie wakes up to at least five notifications minimum on a slow day. she's completely baffled by it, but she still watches every single one, always.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie on the other hand, is an instagram reels person and this is genuinely incomprehensible to you. you receive reels from ellie that were funny approximately four to six months ago. memes that have been dead and buried and mourned.

you

ellie. this meme is from february

ellie 🦕

okay? it's funny

you

it was funny... in FEBRUARY

ellie 🦕

it was funny in february and it's still funny now

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who receives a good morning texts from you every single day, without fail. even if it's just "gm <3" at 6am while half asleep. ellie wakes up to them and her whole morning is different.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie quietly opens her camera roll and just looks at your pictures for a while when the missing gets particularly bad. she always avoided cameras, even before meeting you. always turned her face away or groaned whenever someone pulled out a phone, but now she wishes she had documented every ordinary little moment that felt infinite at the time. she regrets not taking more pictures so much.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is a composed person... generally. she acts all cocky over text until you tell her “i’ll send you something later” and suddenly she’s typing like her hands are vibrating because they, in fact, are. her body just responds before her brain can do anything about it. she genuinely shakes in excitement when she knows you’re about to send boobs or ass, like a damn chihuahua. pacing around her room and checking her phone every four seconds.

you figured out very early that you have an extraordinary amount of power in this specific situation and you use it responsibly (well... no.)

ellie 🦕

i was in a meeting????

you

i know 😚

ellie 🦕

ok so you did that on purpose

you

it was on purpose yes

ellie 🦕

i hate you

you

booo you don't

ellie 🦕

were you actually thinking about me or

you

literally yes. i'm thinking about you alllll the time <33

ellie 🦕

okay

i don't have another meeting until 3

you

LMFAOOO

ellie 🦕

what

you

nothing nothing 😇

you're so cute i can't stand it

ellie 🦕

i'm not cute

so about that 3pm window

you

yes els

yes okay 😭

ellie 🦕

cool cool cool

i mean

good

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie literally gets hit with longing at the the most mundane moments that have no business making her feel like this. like, when she's doing the dishes, or when she hears a song you love, or when she wakes up from naps and reaches for you before remembering... just yearning and daydreaming all day long.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has a moment, just a few months in, where she genuinely cannot see how this works long term and it terrifies her. she almost texts you about it at 2am. instead, she stared at the ceiling for an hour and then send "i really like you" completely unprompted. you answer immediately "i really like you too ILOVEYOUUUU <3333 go to sleep. long day tomorrow"

and the crisis passes, just like that.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie owns an “i ♡ my girlfriend” pin. it’s clipped onto her backpack right beside the one joel got her for her birthday a few years ago. she looks super proud every time someone points it out and will talk about her awesome girlfriend—you, of course. it has never been removed and it will never be removed. it will be on that backpack until the backpack disintegrates.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie gets a summer position doing guided tours for children at her local natural history museum. this is objectively perfect for her and also a disaster because ellie is great at information but not so great at children, or so she claims. she called you in a quiet panic on her second day.

"there's so many of them and they won't stop moving and one of them just licked a bone?"

obviously, you immediately appoint yourself as ellie's unofficial child-wrangling consultant. you had been handling this exact category of chaos for some time now, so you gave her the tips you'd collected the hard way. the advice starts coming in unprompted, but ellie listens to all of it and takes notes.

"okay, if a kid won't stop touching the display, what you do is give them a job. tell them they're the official display guardian. suddenly it's their responsibility to protect it."

ellie tries this the next day, and it miraculously works.

͙͘͡★ so, this becomes a thing. ellie encounters a child situation, texts you, you provide a strategy, ellie implements it, and it works most of the time, so she ends up using your techniques constantly.

“okay guys, if you can hear me clap once!” and suddenly twenty children are listening to her. holy shit. witchcraft? maybe.

ellie starts looking forward to having problems just so she can ask you about them.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie by the end of the summer is genuinely good with the kids on her tours. like actually really good. she crouches down to their level and speaks to them like small intelligent people and gets them excited about bones and fossils they did not care about in the first place.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has a contact photo of you that you hate with your whole entire heart. it was taken during autumn. you're sitting on a park bench, mikey in your arms, laughing at something off camera — something she said, probably, though neither of you can remember what. you were not aware that she was taking a picture; your hair is messy from the wind and your mouth is wide open mid-laugh, your nose scrunched the way it does when you laugh. mikey is looking at the camera with his whole little face.

you've asked her to change it an ungodly number of times but ellie genuinely loves that picture so much that her eyes go a little watery when she looks at it for a long time.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is not a words of affirmation person in general EXCEPT with you over long distance. because she can't touch you or show up the way she wants, so she has to say it. and every time she does, you stores her words up like treasure.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is not sending nudes. this is a non-negotiable that she established early and has maintained with great conviction. she's glad that you respect that completely and never make her feel weird about it.

you, on the other hand, have no such convictions. you send her nudes like you're sending a good morning text. she receives these and has to take a minute because holy fuck? she loves receiving them, loves them BAD. but sending things back? uh, that's an horrifying concept. she just doesn’t feel fully comfortable with it at first, not because she doesn’t trust you —she trusts you completely— she’s just awkward and weirdly shy about it.

the first time ellie sent something, it was completely unannounced. just a mirror picture of her in her sports bra after coming back from the gym.

she slowly starts getting more confident over time, little by little. at first it’s just mirror selfies in sports bras. then maybe the waistband of her boxers peeking out low on her hips, maybe a blurry picture of her stomach while she’s laying in bed... she always sends what she's comfortable with and nothing more, so, her face isn't showing in most of these pictures.

the no face rule is also firm and you think it's actually really cute.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie spends like twenty minutes deciding whether or not to send a picture only for it to be the tamest thing you’ve ever received in your life, but to her it feels insanely vulnerable. she gets embarrassingly proud of herself afterwards too, trying to act all casual while clearly waiting for praise.

ellie 🦕

so

was that like. cool or whatever.

you

i almost passed out in the middle of the grocery store

ellie 🦕

okay relax

you

NO because why are you casually sending me stomach like that ??? happy pride to ME !!!!

need you so bad phone sex isn’t enough anymore actually i’m being serious

and then you said the most explicit shit she ever read.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie gets so flustered when you’re explicit because she never expects it despite the fact that you have literally been dating for ages. you’ll say the most insane out of pocket thing imaginable and she’ll just stare at her phone blinking slowly with her cheeks burning bright red. she secretly loves knowing she can affect you like that, loves when you lose your mind over the smallest things she sends. she still genuinely can’t believe you want her that much.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is, however, extremely and immediately down for phone sex every single time. her consistency is actually remarkable... this is not something she needs convincing about AT ALL. she's down for it literally every time, there is no situation where she’s turning down phone sex. you could text “u busy" and she’s already plugging her headphones in. the contrast between "will not send a single picture" and "phone call? yes. right now? yes." is something you find both hilarious and incredibly her.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has a name for you when you're grumpy. it started because you called her once when you were in a sour mood that had no single cause, just the accumulation of a long day. she listened to you rant for minutes before saying, very calmly:

"okay, miss trunchbull."

you got grumpier immediately, which made her laugh. and you cannot stay grumpy through that laugh, you've tried, and it's physically impossible, but you were determined that day so you stayed grumpy a little while through sheer force of will before it cracked you open.

so, she calls you miss trunchbull just when you're grumpy because it makes you grumpier first and then not grumpy at all. it's the most efficient method of fixing your mood and she uses it without shame.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie almost cried tears of joy when your old phone finally died. not because she hated it or anything — she had defended that thing for months actually. “it’s still working” she’d say every time you complained about storage or battery life or the camera quality resembling active surveillance footage. it served you well. it was a good phone. she harbors no ill will toward it whatsoever.

but the second you texted her my phone finally gave up she sat up so fast because okay, that meant you were getting a new one… a better one. with a better camera, probably. which meant she got to see you in HIGH DEFINITION.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie was genuinely stunned into silence for a second the first facetime call after you got the new phone. because suddenly there you were, her girl. all pretty and alive looking on her screen. your face clear and detailed in a way she hadn't seen in months. she could see the exact shade of your eyes, the little moves your eyebrows made while talking, the texture of your lip gloss. the tiny beauty mark in your face that she used to kiss all the time.

her eyes went embarrassingly wet.

obviously, she became immediately unbearable afterwards.

“wait hold on move closer.”

“lemme see your makeup.”

“baby your skin looks crazy good on this thing, what the fuck?"

“wait, smile again”

“okay now turn your head to the side please— wait, you got a new piercing?"

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie did not come pre-assembled for this relationship. opening up —about feelings, mostly— did not come naturally to her. it took time, an embarrassing amount of time, by her own private admission.

joel miller raised her, so one can do the math.

early on she'd go quiet when something was wrong and you'd be on the other side of it not knowing what you'd done or what she needed. more than once you asked are you okay and got yeah and had to decide whether to believe it or not. sometimes you pushed gently and sometimes you waited, but you got good at reading the difference.

she's quite good at it now. not perfect, and she's probably never going to be perfect, but now she'll tell you when something's wrong and she'll tell you what she needs and she'll say it was a bad day and instead of just not saying it and hoping you somehow know.

you think it's one of the bravest things about her, and you love her a little more for that.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie thinks loving you feels a little like adding honey to bitter things. the bad parts don’t disappear completely, but somehow they become easier to swallow.

you are, very literally, the sweetness of her life.

since you got into her life, her days started feeling softer around the edges simply because you were in them. she notices it especially on bad days, because even when everything feels exhausting and frustrating, there’s still this quiet thought in the back of her mind:

i can call her later.

and somehow, that makes everything feel a little more survivable.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie doesn't talk about you much with joel. not because she doesn't want to, it's just kind of weird, so she keeps it brief. like, she mentions you occasionally. "she's good" when he asks about you. "yeah, we're good" when he asks how's everything between you two. joel doesn't push much and she's thankful for that. still, somehow, he ends up knowing plenty about you anyway through little things she mentions.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie whose lockscreen is a strip of those vintage photobooth pictures with three frames.

in the first, the two of you are side by side, just looking at the camera, her arm around your shoulder

in the second frame, you've turned toward her, one of your hands grabbing her face with absolutely zero gentleness, and you're kissing her cheek so hard she has her eyes closed. her expression is somewhere between laughing and suffering, even though she was delighted.

in the third one you're sitting in her lap and you're kissing her properly.

she’s changed phones twice and somehow the lockscreen always stays the same. she's never changed and never will because you look so pretty in it. she's told you this more than once and she's not saying it to be nice, she's saying it because it's just true.

once she admitted very quietly that she likes it so much because it captured you exactly as she remembers you, just loud and sweet and all over her in the most loving way possible.

“i dunno,” she shrugged afterwards, all awkward about the vulnerability. “you just look really happy with me in them. i like it.”

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie sends you a picture immediately every single time she sees hello kitty and spiderman together anywhere. doesn’t matter where she is. random stores, at the shopping, on gas stations, when she's doing her groceries... you best believe she’ll stop dead in the aisle to take a picture.

ellie 🦕

thought you should know we’re apparently luggage now?

ellie 🦕

you and me

ellie 🦕

i got these two. they reminded me of us

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie stole your hello kitty plushie before leaving. technically, you let her borrow it while she stayed in your place, but one day she left with it tucked under her arm and never gave it back.

in her defense, she fully intended to tell you before leaving. then she forgot. she got back to jackson and unpacked and there it was, sitting in her lap looking guilty as hell. you discovered the theft like four days later.

you

ellie. WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?

turns out, she underestimated how emotionally attached you were to that thing. she should've known, of course, since it was very obviously beloved. poor thing looked like it had survived several wars. one eye missing, fur all faded and discolored, stuffing slightly lumpy from years of being held too much. maybe that’s part of why she loved it immediately.

eventually, after a long dramatic exchange where you accused her of kidnapping and demanded visitation rights that she had to pay, you relented.

you

okay okay okay… you can keep her

take care of my daughter please ☹️

now it sits on her bed in jackson like it belongs there. she uses it as a pillow sometimes, mostly when the missing you thing gets particularly bad. not because it’s comfortable but because it smells like you. like coffee, your shampoo, and that sweet clean scent that clings to your sheets. every time the smell faded a little more she genuinely felt devastated.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie cannot peel an orange without getting nostalgic.

it’s genuinely baffling to her how specific the memory is, too. every time she peels one, the memory just hits her. the juice on your fingers, the smell sharp and sweet in the warm air.

it's this really specific memory: the two of you sitting outside in the sun, eating oranges like two elderly people with nowhere to be and nothing to do. you beside her, handing her a piece before she asked.

you’d peel them together and leave little piles of orange skins between you while talking about absolutely nothing.

it was genuinely nothing. no special occasion, no milestone. just a random afternoon in your backyard eating oranges in the sun because you insisted you needed “vitamin D and enrichment,” so you dragged ellie outside with a bowl of oranges.

she'd been so hot that day, she remembers. she'd also been so happy, but she hadn't said that part out loud.

every time she peels one, she immediately gets hit with this horrible ache in her chest because suddenly she could practically hear your voice again in her ear.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has a locket with a tiny photo of you inside it.

you both do. they're small matching ones in silver, heart shaped and worn from constant use — your idea, which she called cheesy and agreed to in the same breath.

inside hers there’s a tiny picture of you on one side and a picture of the two of you together on the other. inside yours, the same. just ellie where you were. the photos are cut unevenly because you were laughing too hard while trying to trim them with tiny scissors.

she touches it constantly without realizing.

when she’s stressed, her fingers drift there automatically. when she’s tired. when she’s thinking. when she misses you. she’ll rub her thumb over the edge of it absentmindedly over it.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie knows the distance is hard and ugly sometimes. there are nights where missing you sits so heavy in her chest she genuinely doesn’t know what to do with herself besides call you and listen to you breathe for a while. there are days where the time difference frustrates her so badly she has to put her phone down and walk around the block before she starts feeling too miserable about it.

but still, underneath all of that there’s certainty. quiet certainty, but certainty anyway.

it won’t be like this forever.

maybe she’ll come back to you, or maybe you’ll come to her. maybe it’ll take longer than either of you want, but it will happen because she’s sure of it, like the way she’s sure the sun rises every morning in the east. it's not blind optimism, just faith. in you and in what this became. faith in the fact that loving you has rooted itself too deeply into her life to ever become temporary

she doesn't know when it will happen and she's made peace with it, mostly. the logistics are complicated, after all. visas, flights, money, schedules and a thousand more small bureaucratic obstacles that stand between two people who just want to be in the same room again.

she knows all of them by heart. she's been working through them one by one, but she doesn't talk about it much. doesn't say i've been researching flights or i asked about visa requirements again or i've been putting money aside every month since i got back. she just does it without fanfare.

you know, anyway. you can tell by the way she says when instead of if. always when. from the very beginning, it has always been when.

when i visit.

when you come to jackson.

when we're in the same place again.

when i see you again.

when, when, when.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie works so hard for it too. probably harder than you realize. taking extra shifts at the museum and saving money whenever she can, researching programs for once she graduates and jobs late at night when she should be sleeping.

she's building a bridge back to you, piece by piece. slowly but surely.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie once told you, after one particularly difficult night apart:

“i don’t know exactly how yet. but i know i’ll find my way back to you.”

and she meant it with her whole heart.

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⋆｡° ⋆ ˖ a/n:

honey-sick because... homesick. but honey. because she misses you and you’re the sweetness of her life. get it... 😚 maybe it sounded better in my head BUT WHATEVER. maybe i’ll rename this part later hehe

this was originally written as a little extra or as companion piece for my one shot bittersweet, but honestly i think it can be read as a standalone too. it’s basically just ellie and reader being painfully in love across several time zones and trying to survive it <3 also this is my first time writing in this format so i genuinely have no idea if i did this correctly LMFAOOOO but i had so much fun writing it. these two mean everything to me actually. like genuinely i think about them all the time

i wrote this in one sitting and didn't proofread it so the tenses are probably all over the place i’m SO sorry i’ll probably fix them later. or not..

anyway thank you so much for reading ♡ and if you have any requests or thoughts about these two PLEASEEE send them my way because i will take literally any excuse to write more of them 😚 mwah