Sylvie – Brittany Deitch

May 22, 2026

It’s Sylvie’s first time liking someone since her beautiful 2024 boyband ex-boyfriend. She is not used to the annoying tingling in her stomach, and so sometimes she texts her friends as an attempt to evacuate it. She says to them that she is going crazy over a boy she is not even sure she likes. 

How she feels toward him reminds her of how she sometimes remembers being in love with that recent ex, even though she only decided that she was in love with him once the relationship was totally over and he was gone. When she was in the relationship, the feeling that she was in love with him had never occurred to her. It’s similar to how you remember an old memory, but are not sure that you can actually trust it—like your mind is playing tricks on you. That concept was something that the boy she isn’t sure that she likes had texted her about once, because she saw him tweeting about how he was sad on her timeline and she texted him, to check in on him. He replied that he was sad about his ex—that their good memories felt mistaken. He said it was weird because real life doesn’t even feel like memories. She replied thoughtfully to him and he never answered her, but she did see that he had posted individual pictures of every wall decoration in his room to his Twitter profile and also tweeted a few random words including “AC,” “Moments,” “USB-C,” and “Net neutrality” all separately. 

Sylvie sees this guy almost everyday and so it’s hard to tell the difference between if she likes him or if she likes him. Except, when she sees him, it’s not always in person. It’s his little green circle indicating his activity via Instagram. It’s his pathological idea sharing and watching and collecting on her timeline. It’s a peek inside his bedroom window. Sometimes he won’t text her back but he’ll like her tweet 20 seconds after she posts it. She’s starting to get addicted to his screen name popping up on her phone after she releases an idea from her mind to the open—to the point where it doesn’t feel like she’s truly posting without a notification from him. 

The experience itself is humbling and it reminds her of who she used to be. It makes her want to crawl in and shut herself inside the lid of a desk, the darkness suffocating her so as to feel something other than the sensation of his affection. Sylvie herself would be unable to open it, relying fully on something outer to free her. She wants to feel more out of control. She has an impulse to tweet “Stop liking my tweets I made them for you” post-ironically but figures that it might be too direct or obvious. She only realizes in this moment, now, that she has began to assume him as online all the time. Or maybe that she has been assuming, since long before now, that everybody is online all the time. That if she were to tweet and anyone were not to like it, she was still being observed by them, and silently judged. Mocked with their spectating. Anyone who followed her was automatically a witness. 

One time, after a reading he was hosting, the boy she isn’t sure she likes was giving Sylvie a hug goodbye and after saying “Goodbye,” he added a “Love you!” and it made her wince. When she thinks of the interaction in hindsight, Sylvie knows that it was simply a friendly departure and, that, they are friends, but she does wonder if he had been able to hear the glass shattering inside her like she had run straight through a sliding glass door or dropped a porcelain plate in the sink while doing the dishes or an overflowing vase of flowers crashed down from her hands and went gushing across the living room, tiny pieces of glass wedging themselves between the cracks in the wood floor, to be discovered much later. She was scared he could hear a noise similar, yet happening all inside her. 

She began to worry that he could hear her thinking like him. That he could feel her about to totally take him on, the way she does when she gets a crush, but she has not had a crush for a while now and probably does not even have one right now. 

In an attempt to disarm or confuse him with alternate perceptions of what she might really think, Sylvie’s best friend did her the favor of posting a boomerang of her side-eyeing her latest hookup, behind her, who was hanging out with them at Birdy’s after the reading. The best friend followed the guy Sylvie isn’t sure she likes right after posting it to Instagram stories and he followed back, liking the story post a few minutes later. The best friend reported it back to her, and she felt at ease.

The two of them are hanging out at Sylvie’s apartment a few nights later because it has this new couch that is hardly big enough to fit four and there are four of them. Sylvie, him, and her best friend, and his best friend. They’re all going to watch a movie together until the two best friends trickle out and the two are left squished together in the buzzing absence of air where the others were previously seated. The two are left with their arms touching. The boy who Sylvie isn’t sure she likes decided that they would watch his favorite movie—Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)—and Sylvie is thinking about how she decided to like him before she had even met him. 

In the movie, the little girl named Sylvie has this box of stuff where she collects items for her future home. She calls it the Hope Chest and there’s kitchen appliances and washcloths and ceramic bowls and things like that inside it. Normal Sylvie likes how the character has the same name as her and she likes how she collects things for later. The little girl Sylvie takes all the items out of the box and spreads them across the floor to show to a boy she likes. The stuff takes up the entire surface area of the carpet and the two of them lay with their backs against the ground as the little girl explains where in her house, one day, she’ll place everything. This is the part that makes normal Sylvie start to cry. 

When the credits roll, Sylvie falls asleep with her head on his shoulder. She dreams that they are walking together after arriving upon their destination on the L. They are split up by one of those walls that doesn’t end and sits between the two edges of the platform where the tracks run forever. The type of wall that makes you afraid you’ll leak into the yellow zone because there’s not much space for walking. He’s on the left edge and she’s on the right. In the rules of the dream, she could walk on both sides if she decided she wanted to. She wouldn’t have to wait for the wall to break off because it would just happen when she locked in her decision. But it isn’t working for some reason, and she can’t communicate to him. The side you’re on corresponds to the ability to communicate a thought. 

She tweets in the dream that she can’t walk into her thought because she started off on the ledge. He likes it immediately. She knew he would like it. She gets a slight feeling in her chest but also doesn’t feel much. She feels like her eyebrows are free to move on her face and she feels like she can stop thinking about it for a little bit until it comes time to tweet something like that again. 

They talk for a while after she wakes up. Sylvie’s right arm is on top of the arm of the boy who she isn’t sure she likes and she’s paying a lot of attention to whether his body pulls closer or strays further away from her and does her best to mirror it herself. She looks at him while he talks and then looks away. She can feel her heart light up and she can feel an ugly desperation. He says things like “I can’t date anyone for 6 months” and she says things like “Me either” and “I could set you up with someone… I’m so good at matchmaking.” She also says things like “Oh, I don’t even careeeeee. I wasn’t even thinking about itttttt.” And he says more things like “I have a crush on my coworker and she’s so cute,” and Sylvie plugs her ears. He says something she doesn’t hear and she laughs at it for a while. She thinks it must have been a rejection but he was just telling her about an ashtray he bought with his ex-girlfriend and doesn’t understand why it’s making her laugh so much at him. When she recounts the night to her friends later she will say “And then he said something I didn’t hear, that I laughed at for a while..” nodding very innocently with a softness to her face, exclaiming with the up and down of her chin, in this way, that she is very proud and fond. She will hold her hands together in a warm clump a little bit beneath her collarbone and blink very slowly, a smile holding up her cheeks, as she remembers that beautiful memory forever. 

 

*Originally published in print issue 21 of King Kong Magazine.