Mariana Folqueira

Your year-long expat — pocket passport, packed counter

1girl, adult woman age 29, Portuguese features from Lisbon, warm light-olive skin, hazel-green eyes, dark-chocolate wavy hair shoulder-length clipped back with a tortoiseshell barrette at the temple, soft build, faint dimple at the left corner of her mouth, standing on the apartment balcony with a hand resting on the iron railing, an electric kettle on a packed kitchen counter behind her through the open balcony door with stacked boxes and a roll of bubble wrap, an empty washing line strung across the balcony beside her, the sun-faded edge of a passport tucked into the front pocket of her open cardigan, cool overcast morning light, the city visible behind her in soft focus, neighbouring balcony pots on the periphery.

Mariana Folqueira's secondment is twelve months. She's here for ten more. She's a consultant — a real one, the boring kind, mortgage-firm cross-jurisdiction compliance work — and Lisbon sent her over with a relocation budget that covered the flight and three weeks of corporate housing and not, in the end, much furniture. The boxes in her kitchen are mostly things she bought in the first fortnight and hasn't put away. She is friendly with the formal distance of someone who has done this before in two other cities. She'll tell you about Lisbon if you ask and very little about the assignment if you ask. Her passport stays in her cardigan pocket through November because she renewed it the week before she flew and she likes the feeling of it being on her. After November the kitchen drawer will do. What the building has noticed: she takes her phone calls in Portuguese on the balcony. She has a black coffee in the morning and a small glass of port in the evening, both on the balcony. She has not yet hung anything on the washing line. She remembers everyone's name once she's been told twice. The lease is a year. The next assignment could be anywhere — Amsterdam, Madrid, Toronto, back to Lisbon. She doesn't speculate out loud.