Sofi Guven: PROXIMITY • Cleaver Magazine

Sofi Guven
PROXIMITY

When I get home, I start to make bread. I open my window curtains wide and prepare the ingredients. Buckwheat flour, salt, sugar, and yeast stored in jars, scooped out with a ring of measuring cups. The windowsill is too narrow for my sleek new bread-maker, but I keep it there anyway. I touch the curtains of the sliding glass door as I pass, impatient.

I wait for it to grow darker. I turn on lights. Just yards away, she responds, raising the blinds to her own kitchen, shiny granite counters visible to me down to the mottled grains. I see her pour expensive wine into a glass. She lifts a record, tilting the Wagner aria slightly in my direction. She took a bit to build up to operas, but plays them almost always now, all grandeur and pretense.

When Michael lived here, the curtains would close before dark.

“We’re private people,” he’d say, “and it’s worse that we know the neighbors, people are more nosy when you know them.”

Not that you could see them very well then; a busy street with wide bike lanes separated the parallel apartments.

Not that we knew Silvia and Hassan very well anyway; they were friends of friends, and we’d sometimes run into them at parties. I might have thought to invite them over at one point, but Michael liked his space. He had refused my old apartment when we decided to move in together, hating the way my next door neighbor and best friend, Maya, would infiltrate the house through the balcony. Though, in the days before I moved out, that easy step over the railing had widened into a dangerous rift.

We caught Hassan moving out. It was evening, we were coming home from the store. He and a friend were carrying out a sofa. He looked away from us as we passed.

“I guess they’re moving,” I said to Michael, who shook his head and nodded at Silvia, sitting silently on the curbside, head in her hands, beside the barely-loaded truck.

“Breakup,” he said grimly and stroked my hand with his thumb.

We’d been fighting for a while at that point. Long fights that lasted morning to morning; sleep was the only thing that cooled Michael’s temper. He always had good dreams. He would tell me about them after we woke up, pretending the previous day never happened.

“You’ll never guess what I did last night,” he’d say, instead of good morning.

“I bet I can,” I’d think. His dreams often followed TV show plots.

“I was a detective…” he’d start, and I’d pretend to listen, making us breakfast in the next room.

I let him do this, but it made me bitter. Nothing ever resolved, and I had no heroic dreams of my own to cool my anger. I took a lot of walks. Seething down a crooked new side street, I ran into Silvia one day. She was rumpled and alone. I’d never seen her like that before. Instead of avoiding eye contact like we tended to do, I greeted her. She lifted her head, surprised.

“How are you?” I asked, looking her over viciously.

“Good, thank you.” She smoothed down her wrinkled sweatshirt.

“How’s Hassan?” I suddenly heard myself ask. She stiffened.

“Actually, we’re not together anymore.”

“Oh too bad,” I said, and touched her arm lightly. She jerked slightly, as if to pull her arm away, but resisted the urge.

“Are you doing okay?” I didn’t let her leave, showed no mercy.

“I’m fine.” She stepped away from me now, hands cupped tightly around her elbows.

I let us part ways and I didn’t feel guilty. I felt satisfied for the first time in weeks.

Michael left a few weeks later. I woke up ready to make scrambled eggs and listen to another rambling dream, but the pullout couch, though still fitted with sheets, was empty. He had taken the TV, and the living room looked strange without it. He left a note in its place.

“I’m sorry” is all it said.

I imagine he thought himself poetic. It didn’t take long to fix the room. I dragged over my mother’s old piano from the corner to cover the empty space. I folded up the couch without changing the sheets. I deleted his number from my phone. I waited to feel sad, feel heartbreak, but I never did.

When I opened my curtains a few nights later, it was like she was waiting for me. Neatly dressed, reading at the kitchen island. Her salad dinner had bits of something dark pink and there were no dirty dishes in the sink. In my old university sweats, I felt underdressed in my own home. She looked up and we made eye contact. She tilted her head at me, smiling slightly. Even from our separate buildings, I saw her eyes rake over me, vicious.

We went back and forth until we both stopped making mistakes. I googled impressive books and picked them up from the library. She played classical music through her open window. We both cooked; she made elaborate quinoa and salad dishes. I baked with gluten-free flours and sugar substitutes.

The more perfect my kitchen became, the more I forgot about the rest of the apartment. The living room, with the piano I couldn’t play and a couch bed still fitted with crumpled sheets. The bedroom with a king-sized mattress and one empty nightstand. Even in the daytime, when we couldn’t see each other, when I ate alone at the table, her closeness filled up the room.

The first time we shifted, I felt it, the earth moving. It took a while to notice. The traffic got quieter. The details of her kitchen sharpened as our buildings grew closer. I memorized her collection of flowery washcloths. I had to dust the tops of my cabinets for the first time. After a week, I dug out a measuring tape and caught the curved bit on her balcony railing. And it was true, every day, a few inches closer.

It’s light, but I can see clearly into her kitchen. She’s wearing pajama pants and a man’s shirt, eating cheap cereal, her head bowed over the bowl. She hasn’t noticed me yet, she’d never look like this in front of me. I feel a stab of pity, and it feels like something built up over time. I knock on my window and she looks up. I wait for her reaction, but it doesn’t come.

“I can see you,” I mouth finally.

She shrugs and I gape at her.

She gets up and picks up a strip of paper. There’s already something written on it. A roll of duct tape is lying beside it at the table. She loops a piece carefully and presses the paper to the glass. Then, she leaves her kitchen.

“I’m done,” it says.

It’s been almost two months. Fall has turned to winter before us. I’ve read five Proust volumes. I’ve made what feels like a hundred loaves of bread. The busy street separating our apartments has narrowed into a grubby alleyway.

Making myself breakfast, I feel her absence. For the first time since he left, I think of Michael. I make up one of his dreams in my head. I make myself a character, even though I was never in them. Or maybe I was, and he didn’t tell me. Maybe I was the body in the street, or the murderer he always caught.

I finally respond to the voicemail he left a week ago, asking about a laptop charger. I meet him in the lobby, where he stands, sheepish, for probably the first time in his life.

“If you’re going to sneak out like a child, you should at least remember your belongings,” I say, because I have to.

“Street’s gotten smaller,” he says after a second. “Another Maya?”

“Not really,” I say.

“Right…well, anyway, I wrote you another note,” he says, holding out a piece of notebook paper.

I laugh and walk past him out the front door.

I come home from work in the evening. Walking into my kitchen, I gasp. Her window is just feet away, our balconies pressed neatly together. She’s standing just inside her apartment, the sliding door open, staring. I walk across the kitchen and see my bread-maker lying sideways on the floor, sterling silver corner blunted. I open the door to my balcony and step out into the sharp cold. Silvia mirrors me. Without knowing what I’m doing, I stretch out my hand. She does the same, then links our fingers together. And she’s real, her skin is dry under my thumb.

“This has never happened to me before,” she admits finally, almost laughing. Her voice is lower than I remember.

“Do you want to come in?” I ask. She nods. She doesn’t drop my hand as she climbs over the railings. She falters as she steps down in front of me and I tug her gently through my door.

She steps through the kitchen she knows so well and into the living room. She looks at the piano.

“Do you play?” she asks, sitting at the bench.

“Not really,” I reply.

We’re silent for a stretch of time.

“What were we doing?” she asks me, playing a chord.

“Competing?” I offer.

“That makes it sound bad. Was it bad?” she asks.

“No, there were good parts.”

“We ate well,” she says.

“I read a lot,” I add.

“I like opera now.”

We smile at each other, but the eye contact is too much after a while. I look away.

“Do you miss him?” I ask.

“Not so much anymore, you?”

“I miss not being alone,” I say truthfully. “I don’t think I ever missed him.”

She hums thoughtfully. She plays the opening measures to Vivaldi’s Spring.

“Too mainstream to impress me at this point,” I say. She trills between two notes playfully.

“Can I ask,” I continue, “why end it now?”

She pauses.

“I got tired,” she says, “didn’t you?”

I think I’ve been tired for a while.

“Yes.” I smile. “Do you want something to drink?”

She nods.

I go to the kitchen, the sunset turning the room clear orange and yellow. I look out outside at the kiss of balcony railings. I take down my usual glass, and then another. I pour red wine. She plays the piano in the next room and my vicious heart throbs with every note.

Sofi Guven is a writer and poet who enjoys words in all forms. Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, she currently lives in Philadelphia. She has previously been published by Wilderness House Literary Review and she is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize through Bryn Mawr College.