He stands at the balcony, watching the fading sunlight drip orange and red into the dirty puddles in the street below. It smells like clean and rain and aching loneliness, the kind that clenches in his chest and numbs his toes. Every once in a while, a bird will flit from the shingles of a rooftop to a carefully budding branch, and it reminds him of his childhood in a way that's both painful and warm.
When the reds have given way to indigo and goosebumps pebble the skin of his arms, he spots a girl, huddled in a blue turtleneck sweater and muddy black boots. She's sitting on a bench under a streetlamp across from his apartment, and he realizes with an uncomfortable twinge that she's sobbing.
It's ugly crying, the uncontrollable kind that just keeps bubbling up in your throat and streams hot and insistent past your eyelids. The sobs wrack her body almost rhythmically, her arms clutched tight to her chest, and then all of a sudden they subside. She inhales, so sharp and desperate that he can hear it from a story away, and then exhales in a breath that seems to be filled with all of her sadness combined, leaving her looking frail and tired. He just stands there, feeling more and more like an intruder.
Their eyes meet, and he's caught. The moment is too heavy, too raw, and it looms overhead, threatening to crush him if he breaks away. On some bizarre impulse, he twitches his wrist in an awkward wave. She stares at him for four beats of his heart, and then she smiles, and it's startlingly lovely. She has this wide, almost too stretched-out grin, like she hadn't smiled in weeks and her muscles can't quite remember what's natural. She waves back, sort of floppy and sad, and wipes at her glistening cheeks with the back of her hand. She curls in on herself, and his body tenses in recognition of pain.
He goes back inside because he still doesn't really know what else to do. There's some candy on his kitchen counter, some left over mini Snickers from his sister-in-law's birthday, and he thinks "why the hell not?" and grabs a handful. He's halfway out the door when the thought occurs that maybe he should put them in something so it's easier for her to carry, and so he dumps them in a plastic sandwich bag and tears down the stairs.
He opens the door to the street, but she's already gone. He sort of stands there, staring at the soggy, empty bench, sort of lost and then after a moment embarrassed, and goes back inside.
