Friday Night

It was Friday night. She was exhausted, work these past couple days was a harrowing experience and she was glad to be sleeping in her own bed tonight. She was extremely grateful to have been taken in during the storm, fed some dinner and kept company. It had been the perfect place to be, curled up in a soft gray blanket on the couch playing guitar and reading her Kindle while the snow fell outside...

But she was glad to drive the winding road to her own house. The road was still snowy in parts, the shadow parts the sun didn't touch. Driving up to her house, the plow had built a wall of snow in front of her gravel driveway. The road was narrow. She took a chance and parked on the side-- too narrow for other cars to pass-- and decided to do her bit of shoveling. It was 5:30. The sun would be set in 25 minutes.

But it was Friday night and she had nothing better to do. Her friends were snowed in or gone away. She wouldn't take the chance to drive anywhere anyway. Two days. Three nights. The weekend loomed before her. It was the first weekend she'd had without any plans in a long while. It was the first weekend she was off work and... well. That old ache crept back into her chest but she pushed it down fiercely. She'd been there. Done that. Cried those tears. Come to terms with those things.

She started a list of all the things she'd put off this week. Heck, the things she'd put off this whole month. The past two months. Since October... Those things would get done tomorrow or Sunday. She thought of Sunday. Maybe church. Maybe the Buddhist temple she kept talking about. She thought about all the things she could do to fill her time until Monday. Sure, there was plenty. She was hanging out with her family on Sunday. She's possibly having coffee with a friend tomorrow, a friend who was in the same boat and with the same long weekend staring at her in the face.

She looked forward to April and the plans she was making. Soon, she would be in a lively house filled with people and life. Soon, she would be out of West Shawnee and out of the snowy isolation the threatened to push against the very walls of her little house. Soon it was be Spring and perhaps she would be living in Brookside or the Plaza and life would settle into a rhythm she could adapt to.

For now, tonight, she would listen to Patty Griffin and Jack Johnson and (God help her) Eric Church on Spotify and she would read her newest Serdaris book on her Kindle. She might open Netflix and watch a documentary and fall asleep around midnight, wrapping her arms around her shoulders to ward off the chill. She would awake whenever she did tomorrow and maybe go to the gym.

Yes, she nodded. That sounded about right. . .