The Neighbor You Never Properly Met

Years of nodding in a hallway, a wave from a car window, a shared understanding of which nights are trash night — and somehow never a real conversation, never even a first name confirmed out loud. Then they move, and there's a small, disproportionate grief for someone you couldn't have picked out of a lineup with certainty a week earlier. Proximity accumulates its own kind of intimacy, even without a single real exchange to justify it.