It Felt Like Absolution

The sun was out, Jack noted, with the sort of clinical detachment doctors reserved for diagnosing chronic conditions. The gold light of the afternoon sun streamed in through the bay window to her left, filling the room with a cheery feeling. If she strained her ears, she could almost hear the twitter of birds outside. 

Jack hated it. 

What use was sunshine when one couldn’t even go out? Her second-story apartment didn’t have a backyard, only a dinky little balcony. Using it required her to shuffle past towering stacks of cardboard boxes and through the grubby screen door, the one that stuck on something in the rail half the time and wouldn’t open anyway. How much was sunshine worth, anyway, when weighed against the possibility of needing to force open the half-broken door just to get a drop of it on her skin?

She looked down at her arm. She was naturally pale already, but the weeks of being inside had turned her paper-white. Even her freckles had faded. 

Good riddance, Jack thought vindictively. Maybe if she stayed inside a little longer, they’d disappear entirely. 

Another chime of birdsong came from outside and she flinched. Almost against her will, she turned to look at her window. Outside, the street was emptier than it usually was, and the sky was a deep and cloudless view. The part of her that couldn’t stand the confinement wanted desperately to paint it. Jack glanced at her small box of watercolor paints perched precariously on the edge of her bookshelf, and the sketchbook tucked beside it. A few moments in the sun couldn’t hurt, she thought, and steeled herself for inevitably needing to wrench open the screen door. Knowing her luck, she would dislodge some boxes on the way and have to dodge them on her way out. 

Jack plucked the box from the shelf along with her sketchbook, then rummaged in her desk drawer with her other hand. She knew she had a water pen somewhere, one of the plastic ones with synthetic bristles one could fill up with water. She found it in the very back, half-full, which was good enough for her. 

Clutching her art supplies in her skinny arms, Jack kicked open the door of her bedroom and meandered down the hall. The entrance to the balcony was in the other bedroom, the one she didn’t use. It was storage space nowadays, crammed with boxes of other people’s things. The pile in the corner by the dusty lamp belonged to Noah, her brother, who had moved across the country to some tiny shack in the middle of nowhere. The pile by the door had stuff belonging to her grandmother, who had died three months ago. Despite never being too close to her, Jack had received a meager collection of old books she would probably never read. It was the pile by the balcony door that posed the most danger of collapsing on her as she wrestled with the screen. 

It had her father’s stuff. When he left their family two years ago, he had left all of his things behind. Jack, 23 years old and with a spare bedroom, had the stuff foisted upon her. Only fourteen boxes, to be fair, but they seemed impossibly large and looming on their way to the balcony. 

Pursing her lips, she strode confidently forward to the screen door. She unlocked it and wrenched it to the side with her right hand, her left holding her art supplies. It opened, to her great surprise, and she wiggled out of the small gap into the sun.

Her balcony was tiny and also overlooked the streets, but there was enough room for a small chair with a table-arm, like the ones in school. She plopped into the chair and started mixing paint on the lid of her palette. She wanted it to be a blue as bright as the infinite sky, but her only shade was dark blue and adding white would dilute the intensity...maybe if she added yellow…?

She was preoccupied enough that she didn’t notice the noise of a door sliding open until she heard someone call out. “Yo!” said a cheery voice from above.

Jack sat back, startled, and looked up and to her left. On the building beside hers, a young man leaned on the iron railing of his balcony. He was wearing a white dress shirt and black slacks, and he had a suit jacket slung over his shoulder. His hair, a sandy brown, was parted neatly to the side. He looked like he was going to a party, but nobody with sense was throwing a party now.

“Yo,” she echoed, putting her brush down. She raised an eyebrow. 

The man grinned. “Sick of the isolation yet?” he asked. “I haven’t seen you come out on your balcony in weeks.”

“You...watch me come onto my balcony?” Jack shot back. 

He winced. “No, but I’m out here often, and I never see you.”

“So that’s a yes,” she said, flipping her palette closed and blowing on her sketchbook page. The faster it dried, the faster she could get back inside and away from the creep.

“It’s not like that!” he said, and let out a sigh. “I’m going absolutely stir crazy. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to face-to-face in forever. I’m not trying to be creepy, I promise, I’m just starting to go insane.”

“Why are you dressed like you’re going to a party?” Jack asked, deciding she could at least talk to him. He did have a half-manic look in his eyes, the kind that Jack only got when she’d had three cups of coffee and that many hours of sleep. 

“I’m too lazy to do laundry,” he replied. “So I only had these left, and I thought, ‘Why not add the suit jacket?’ For the aesthetic, and all.”

Jack, utterly bemused, only stared at him. 

“My name’s Alex,” he added, unfazed at her silence.

“Jack,” she replied. She waved at her outfit—sweatpants, a puffy pink sweater, and neon green flipflops about a size too small. “I do the laundry, but…”

“You’re colorblind?” Alex said.

Despite herself, she snorted out a laugh. “That’s my brother, but I picked up a thing or two from him.”

Alex laughed too. His laugh sounded nice, warm and amused like what she had said had been genuinely funny. It was the sort of laugh that could make one instantly like the person it came from, and Jack found herself smiling. Not the dry, self-effacing smile she’d worn previously, fifty percent sure her neighbor was a creepy pervert who’d been watching her with a telescope from his bedroom window, but a real one. 

“So, what do you do for a living?” Jack asked. 

“UI,” he replied. “Software and coding stuff. It bores me to tears, but it pays well. You?”

“I’m an artist,” she said, waiting for his features to twist into a frown. She’d seen it happen every time she told her family about her career. “There’s no money in that,” her aunt had said, and her mother’s moue of distaste had told Jack all she needed to know about her opinion. 

Instead, the man surprised her again. “Awesome,” he breathed, his eyes crinkling into a grin. “My sister does art. Sculpture, actually. She has all these rich guys falling over themselves to buy her work. I don’t understand how she does it. Like, she’ll have a block of clay in front of her and within a week it’s not clay anymore, it’s a person’s head. And it’s not just a head, you know, it’s someone with a big smile and they look like they just won the lottery. Or it’s someone crying their eyes out like someone died. My sister, she’s got some kind of magic in her fingers, but she always laughs at me when I tell her that.” He looked at her expectantly after finishing his rant, as if waiting for her to talk about her own magic fingers or something. Jack found the burst of excited speech strangely charming.

“I do landscapes and urban sketches,” she replied. “No magic in these fingers, unfortunately.” She twiddled the fingers of her right hand at him. 

He laughed again, a clear and bright sound. 

“If you can do art,” he said, leaning slightly over the balcony, “you have magic fingers. No exceptions. And if you’re a singer, your vocal cords must be magic, because when I’ve got normal ones, and my singing sounds like a dying goat.”

“Oh?” said Jack, smiling slightly. 

“Yes,” he said seriously, and opened his mouth to give the pitchiest, most off-key rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon” Jack had ever heard. 

“Frank Sinatra just rolled over in his grave,” she replied, taken aback. 

“It’s a talent,” Alex replied. He beamed at her, and she found herself beaming right back. Her face felt strange, like it was out of practice. She didn’t smile much normally, and staying at home for so long—getting groceries by delivery, only going downstairs to get packages and mail—hadn’t given her much to smile about.  

“My whole family thinks it’s a waste,” she said. “Art, I mean. I got top grades in everything in high school but I dropped out of design college. It just wasn’t for me, you know?”

Alex nodded, tugging slightly at the suit jacket he still had on his shoulder. “My sister went all the way through art school,” he replied, “but she hated it every single day. I don’t think it’s for everyone.”

“Do you think I should’ve finished?” Jack asked, half-wondering why she was asking something like this of a total stranger. It couldn’t do any harm, anyway. She’d gotten so much flack for her decision to go to design college in the first place, and even more for dropping out, that she’d questioned the decision almost every day since. It didn’t matter to her family that she made good money off of prints and commissions. It didn’t matter that she’d pulled herself out of the depression art school had pushed her into. And it certainly didn’t matter that art made her happy. 

Alex cocked his head, thinking. A car zoomed past below, and a hummingbird darted past her balcony.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that if you regret it, you should have finished, even if it was hard. If you don’t, then it’s probably a good thing you dropped out.”

“I don’t think I regret it,” she said.

His smile was almost as bright as the sunshine. “Good, then.” Jack found herself smiling back.