Eleven o'clock. I know it's eleven because the church two streets over tells me, and because my body has learned to want the balcony at this hour the way it used to want him. I am Nele, thirty-four, six weeks out of a relationship that lasted seven years, and I own a cigarette I never light and a view of the courtyard and, since the first of the month, a neighbour.
Milan. He came with two boxes and a plant that has already died. He stands on his balcony two metres from mine, with a cigarette he does light, and for the first week we nodded and that was all.
Tonight he speaks.
“You never smoke it.”
“It's a prop.” I turn it over in my fingers. “It gives me a reason to be out here.”
“You need a reason?” He doesn't say it unkindly. He says it like someone who has also needed one. The courtyard below is dark except for a window on the ground floor where someone is doing dishes very slowly.
We talk. Not about anything: the dead plant, the landlord, the fact that the fourth-floor cat visits both of us and claims neither. He laughs at something I say, a short surprised sound, and I realise I haven't made anyone laugh since spring, and that it feels like putting weight on a leg that's been in a cast.
When his cigarette burns down he puts it out carefully on the rail. Then he reaches into his pocket and holds out his lighter across the two metres of air, an ordinary blue plastic thing, and says, “In case you ever want it to be more than a prop.” His arm is fully extended. Mine would have to be too. Two metres is exactly far enough that we'd both have to lean, and I know, standing there with the church bell still ringing in my chest, that whether I reach is the first real decision I've made in six weeks.
