2. Elara
Elara
My stomach makes a sound I can only describe as editorial.
It’s been doing it for an hour. At first I ignored it, the way I ignore most feedback, but it’s escalating now. It has notes. It would like to speak to a manager.
“Fine,” I tell it. “We’ll eat.”
The kitchen has nothing in it that wants to become a meal without my active participation, and I am not in a participating mood.
There’s half a pizza in the fridge from — Sunday?
Monday? It’s from a day. It’s wearing foil.
I take the whole thing out, foil and all, and eat a slice standing at the counter, cold, because turning on the oven is a commitment and I’m not ready for that kind of relationship.
“Cold pizza is a separate food,” I tell Gerald, on my way back to the desk, second slice already in hand.
“It’s not leftover anything. It’s its own thing.
The cheese has set. It has structure now.
Integrity. You can hold it like a document.
” I hold it like a document. “Hot pizza falls apart in your hands like it doesn’t respect you. This respects me.”
Gerald has no follow-up questions.
The article is still empty. The cursor is still blinking. The deadline is still Friday, which is not yet, but soon, and it’s going to be my fault when I’m scrambling.
We didn’t stop wanting connection. We just rerouted it.
That’s still the only sentence. It’s been the only sentence for two days. It’s starting to feel less like a first line and more like a thing I say to myself in the dark.
I am eating cold pizza and staring at a sentence when my phone lights up.
DELIVERED. Your package has arrived.
Oh, right.
I forgot I’m becoming a better person. I ordered it three weeks ago at one in the morning, the way all my best decisions arrive — a whole regimen, serums and a cream and something called an essence, which I’m pretty sure is just water that costs money, but the woman in the video had skin like a lit candle and I wanted that.
I wanted to be a lit candle. I clicked the button.
Past me, looking out for present me. We don’t always get along but she comes through.
“This is the glow-up,” I announce to no one, peeling myself out of the chair. “Friday I’ll have a finished article and a face. New me.”
The box is in the lobby, on the mail table, sitting there being mine. I carry it back up two flights like a trophy. It’s heavier than skincare should be, but maybe that’s the essence. The essence has weight. I’m already getting my money’s worth.
I’m three steps into my apartment, already picturing the candle situation, when I notice the paper.
It’s tucked under the flap of the box. Folded once. Cream-colored, nicer than the box itself, the kind of paper that came from somewhere with intentions.
A little card, probably. Thanks for your order. Here’s a coupon. Here’s how to layer your serums. I’ve gotten a hundred of these. They always have a girl on them being radiant at me.
I unfold it.
Your light reaches farther than you know.
That’s it. Handwriting. No logo, no coupon code, no smiling radiant girl, no xoxo the team. Just the one line, in ink, pressed hard enough that I can feel the words on the back of the paper when I run my thumb across it.
I read it again.
Okay. So this is a marketing thing. This is a brand that paid someone to write affirmations by hand because it tests well with women my age, and it does, that’s the infuriating part, it absolutely tests well, my chest did a thing just now and the thing was engineered.
They want me to feel seen. They want me to post it.
Look how thoughtful my serum company is.
No. Not falling for it. I see the strategy.
I respect the strategy. I will not be participating in the strategy.
Except it doesn’t say the brand name anywhere. A brand would say the brand name. That’s the whole reason a brand spends money — so you know it was them. This says nothing. This is an affirmation with no sponsor, which is just a sentence a stranger decided I needed.
Influencer thing, then. A gifting campaign, the kind where they don’t tell you it’s a campaign so your delight looks authentic.
Or it’s for the unit two-twelve, the woman with the dog, and it got tucked in the wrong box downstairs.
Or somebody’s running a very slow, very expensive prank on the entire building.
Or it’s nothing. It’s nothing and I’m a woman standing in her doorway interrogating a piece of cardstock instead of writing the article that pays for the cardstock.
I should throw it away.
I open the door to check the hall instead.
Erik is across the hall, fitting his key into his own lock, and my first feeling — before anything sensible, before hello, before any of it — is genuine annoyance that my neighbor exists and is here and is going to make me be a person in a hallway.
I’m not annoyed at him. Just the situation. At the fact that I’m in socks and a sweatshirt that says WORLDWIDE PASTA and I have ink on my thumb and a slice of cold pizza in the other hand and now there’s a witness.
“Hey.” He says it easy, like we do this. We don’t really do this. Three years and we’ve done the nod, the after you at the mailboxes, the can you sign for mine if I’m out. This is more words than usual already.
And then I do the thing. I don’t decide to do it. I’m just suddenly holding the note out across the hall like he’s got answers.
“Did you get one of these?”
He comes over. He reads it. He’s close enough now that I can smell him, and he smells like — okay, he smells like a forest, somehow, like pine and cold air and the inside of a hike, which makes no sense, because we are in Chicago, on the third floor of an apartment building.
I’m going to pretend I didn’t notice that.
“No,” he says. Hands it back. “Where’d it come from?”
“My skincare. I think. It was in the box. Or, on the box. Unless it wasn’t, which is the part I’m —” I stop. “It probably came with the skincare.”
He doesn’t tell me it’s nothing. He doesn’t tell me it’s something. He reads it one more time and hands it back like it’s a takeout menu someone left on my box.
“Weird,” he says.
“Right? That’s what I said. Well — I didn’t say it out loud. To a person. I said it to my plant.”
“How’d he take it?”
“He’s processing.”
That gets the corner of his mouth. Not a full smile. A down payment on one.
I’m aware that I’ve shown a man I barely know a strange note within four seconds of opening my own door. His armful of mail and his easy hey and his stupid forest.
Some part of me already likes Erik. Not like that. Just as a person. I decided he’s fine. I don’t remember deciding it. It seems to have happened a while ago, without a meeting.
“It’s probably a brand thing,” I say, because the silence is getting roomy. “They do this now. Hand-written affirmations. Makes you feel special so you’ll buy the moisturizer.”
“You must be pretty special, then.” The corner of his mouth tips up again. “Ella.”
It’s nothing. It’s a normal thing a normal person says.
It hits me, fast, before I have any say in it, and I try to keep my face under control, but heat is climbing up from my neck, and the worst part — the genuinely unforgivable part — is that he’s looking right at me when it happens.
Nobody calls me Ella. I’m Elara to everyone. Elara on the byline, Elara to Mom, Elara Dorne on the package that started this. He just — shortened it.
Like it was already his.
And he saw the whole thing happen on my face.
He doesn’t say anything about it. That’s almost worse. He just lets the little smile finish forming.
Dammit.
“I have deadlines,” I say.
He waits.
“Words,” I clarify. “I have to go make some. Words. For money. That’s my — I write things. I have to go write things now. Bye!”
I am back inside my apartment before I finish the sentence. The door is closed. My back is against it. I am still holding the cold pizza.
“That,” I tell Gerald, “was a completely normal interaction between two adults who are neighbors.”
Gerald, sunlit and serene on the windowsill, does not contradict me, because he is a plant and also because there is no contradicting it. It was completely normal. Nobody did anything strange. Nobody got flustered over the nickname. Nobody fled their own hallway.
I peel myself off the door.
“Nobody embarrassed themselves,” I add.
A lie. We both know it’s a lie. Gerald has the grace not to bring it up.
My phone rings while I’m still standing here holding the box. The screen says MOM, and I answer it the way I always answer it, on the second ring, because the first ring is for pretending I have a life too busy to pick up and the second is the truth.
“There she is,” Mom says. “I was about to give up.”
“You waited one ring.”
“I waited plenty of rings. How’s my girl? Are you eating?”
“I’m eating right now.” Technically. “Pizza, there’s tomato on it. That’s produce.”
“Tomato on a pizza is not produce.”
“It started as produce. It had dreams.”
She laughs, and I can hear the kitchen behind her, the specific clink of her doing three things while she talks to me because she’s never once in her life sat still for a phone call. “Did you finish your article?”
“It’s coming along.”
“That means no.”
“It means along. It’s a journey.”
“Mm.” She lets it go, which is its own kind of love, the not-pushing. “You sound tired, baby. Are you sleeping? Are you getting out at all? Margaret’s son is back in the city, you know, he’s an engineer now —”
“I’m not dating Margaret’s son.”
“I didn’t say date him. I said he’s an engineer. I’m allowed to share community news.”
“You’re allowed. I’m allowed to hang up.”
“You wouldn’t.” She’s right. I wouldn’t. “I just worry about you in that apartment all alone with that plant.”
“Gerald’s excellent company.”
“Gerald is a houseplant, Elara.”
“And he’s never once asked if I’m dating Margaret’s son.”
That gets the real laugh, the one that goes up at the end, and for a second I can see her exactly — flour somewhere on her, phone pinned to her shoulder, the dish towel over the oven handle that has been there since before I could reach it.
“Okay, okay,” she says. “I’ll stop. I just miss your face.”
“I miss yours too, Mom.”
“Send me a picture. A real one, not the ones where you’re making the face.”
“All my faces are real faces.”
“Send me one where you look like you slept.”
“That narrows it down to never.”
“Elara.”
“I love you. Go finish whatever you’re stirring.”
“It’s not stirring, it’s a roux, it requires my attention.” She sighs. “Write your article. Eat a vegetable. Call me Sunday.”
“Sunday.”
“Love you, baby.”
“Love you.”
And then the line goes quiet, and so does the apartment.
The fridge hums. Somewhere below me a door shuts. I’m fine. This is fine. This is the regular amount of quiet for a Wednesday, the regular amount of quiet for a woman who chose this, who likes her own company, who is, by every measure she’s willing to look at, doing great.
I go put the skincare in the bathroom. I line it up on the shelf, the serum and the cream and the essence-infused water, all of it promising to make me glow, and I look at myself in the mirror.
I could use the glow right now.
Then I go back to work.
The note is still in my sweatshirt pocket.
I find it when I sit down, pull it out. Even though I’ve already memorized it. Kind of hard not to.
Your light reaches farther than you know.
It means nothing. It’s serum copy. It’s a glitch in someone’s gifting database. It’s a sentence with no return address that happened to find me on a day I was already a little thin.
I refold it along the crease it came with. I should toss it. There’s a trash can a foot from my chair. It would take no effort at all.
I put it back in my pocket.
The article is open. The page is still mostly blank. The cursor blinks at me, patient, still nowhere to be. Across the hall a man who smells like a forest and gave me a nickname and I don’t know what to do with.
I put my fingers on the keys.
“Okay,” I tell Gerald. “New me.”
We didn’t stop wanting connection. We just rerouted it. We let it reach us through a screen, where it’s safe, where nobody shows up smelling like a —
I stop.
I read the line back. I delete the last four words.
I don’t think about why I wrote them.
I sit there for a second with my hands off the keys, and then I put them back, and I keep going.