Edna moves to a new city in a new country because rent really is cheaper here than where she’s from. At least, that’s what she tells her sister. There’s a window to the back courtyard, which she keeps open. She’s just one story up, no air conditioning.  

There’s one apartment across the courtyard level with hers. One window, usually open. Inside, there’s a man.  

She walks past those circular stands of postcards on the street, next to corner shops and used bookstores, and wants to buy one and write him a note. I’m watching you. You remind me of my seventh-grade science teacher. No, Frank Sinatra. She buys four––the river, the small church by the river, the big church in the city center, and a black-and-white shot of a neat four-person family in what one might call “traditional dress”––but she doesn’t write on any and keeps them for herself.  

Edna imagines their conversations. Wants to hear the man’s voice drift into her bedroom. Does he live alone? Pick up the phone, she wills him. Talk to your ex-wife or your grown daughter or your business partner with whom you’re in love. 

At a café one morning, a man with hairy arms stands too close, so their arms brush and she steps away and away again. He practices English vocabulary with flashcards on his phone. “You speak English?” he asks. How could he tell? “But do you know these?” Arcane. Moribund. Slake. Alacrity. 

“Something like alarm,” Edna guesses. 

He says, “Ah ah ah,” and tilts the screen toward her. A brisk and ready cheerfulness. “Alacrity is what you have, the friendliness with which we open this conversation.”  

The barista passes their coffee over on the same tray. The man with the flashcard app raises his eyebrows. He says, “So you think we are together?”  

Her sister calls and talks about visiting, and Edna almost says, about the man across the courtyard: he eats toast with jam and salami at his desk in the mornings, so I have been doing the same. He writes early and late, so I have been doing the same. I think about tearing paper from my notebook and attempting an airplane with a message, but the pages are a flimsy 75 gsm. If I said anything out the window, he’d hear it. He might even know it’s for him.  

Edna doesn’t say this, and when her sister hangs up, she’s left with a heaviness that’s unexpected. She’s lived these months now, without expectation, or familiarity. She’s been a stranger, and it suits her well; she’s grown comfortable.  

If the man leaned out his window and whispered, she’d be able to hear it. He’d ask, do you ever feel like you live in a vacuum? Do you ever wish you lived in a vacuum? 

She buys a postcard whenever she passes the shop on the way to the corner grocery. She tries to write one to her sister but feels silly. It’s getting hotter here in the sun, but cooler in the shade. The buildings are so much nicer like this: yellow and orange and white and pink and pale red instead of gray. At 11 pm it’s still light. Telling her about the man across the courtyard is off-limits. Edna can hear how her sister’s voice would rise on the phone. She’d say, are you kidding, Ed, does mom know? So this is why you moved? Your great cross-continental journey of self-discovery!  

Edna has more postcards than she knows what to do with and considers slipping them into purses and bicycle baskets and under massage parlor doors that say Serious Massages Only.  

One day it is raining, and Edna takes the bus home from her part-time shop job. An elderly woman stares and stares and stares right at her, as elderly women and men here are wont to do. But what do they see? In her apartment again, she looks out the window, and the man is gone, his room is dark. The next day, too. His furniture is still there, so maybe he’s left on holiday or to go to a conference or to visit his family. She imagines one daughter. Two. Maybe there’s a secret son, but he doesn’t speak to the son anymore, just thinks about him sometimes very late at night and about all the things he wishes he had said.  

He’s never looked over at her. At least, she’s never caught him glancing, not once, casually, innocently, like anybody might. Curious. Did he know she existed? Of course he did. 

The weekend passes. A week. 

And then one morning the light is on. 

Time’s up. “Now or never.” Edna is standing in front of his apartment door, the one she’s nearly sure is his. She’ll say, a professor I once had who died in an accident reminded me of you. Or, the man down the street who put up lights around the holidays. She’ll say, I always thought I preferred living in a vacuum but maybe that is not the case. Or, as a kid I wanted to be a scientist or a farmer––did you know that? My favorite color was blue, but only the blue of a swimming pool––was that before you left, or after? She’ll say, my mother one summer taught my sister and me to pinch honeysuckle between our teeth.  

When the door opens, she’s surprised they’re the same height. Eyes at eye-level. 

“Oh, hello,” he says. 

He says, “Edna.”  

An electric kettle hisses then beeps.  

“Well, come in,” her father says. 

Edna can see the open window of her own apartment across the courtyard. She sees her IKEA twin bed and pale duvet. The art museum poster she thumbtacked to the wall. Limp flowers in a plastic cup. She sees how he must have been seeing her all along. I feel like I’m five years old again, she wants to say but doesn’t. Up close, you look more like that decades-old photo mom kept tucked in the junk drawer—you in a hoodie in the kitchen––than the grainy corporate headshot I found on Facebook last spring. You remind me of my sister, actually, which I didn’t expect. The way your eyes are far apart like hers, your nose straight and long.  

They sit.  

He pours hot water over limp tea bags.  

And slowly. But only slowly, real words form on Edna’s lips.