Expiration Date

The papaya sat on the counter, its skin mottled like a bruise, waiting. Sarah hadn't touched it since Marcus brought it home three days ago—their last trip to the grocery store together before everything collapsed.

"You're staring at it like it's a riddle," Elena said from the doorway, wine glass in hand. The dinner party hummed behind her. Marcus's friends, now just her friends by default. People who'd chosen sides or tried desperately not to.

"It's past its prime," Sarah said, pressing into the fruit's yielding flesh. "Like us."

Elena's silence felt like an accusation.

Later, Sarah found herself pressed against the bathroom wall, David's hands roaming beneath her dress like he had every right to occupy space Marcus had vacated. His kisses tasted like desperation and merlot. She should have wanted this—a rebound, a clear signal that she was moving on. Instead she felt nothing, just a hollow sensation where desire should live.

"You're so distant," David murmured against her neck. "Like you're not even here."

I'm not, she thought.

She'd become this thing that moved through days on automatic pilot. Showing up to work, smiling at the right moments, eating spinach salads that tasted like obligation, swimming in circles inside a bowl too small for her ambitions. A goldfish with a three-second memory, forgetting and remembering the same pain in an endless loop.

The real sphinx wasn't the Egyptian monument Marcus had dragged her to see—the one where he'd taken the photo she kept framed on her nightstand. The sphinx was silence. It was the way he'd stopped calling, stopped fighting, stopped caring. A riddle without an answer.

Sarah pushed David away gently. "I can't."

"Is it still him?"

"It's not him. It's that I don't know how to be me anymore."

She found herself back at the counter, knife in hand, slicing through the overripe papaya. Its flesh wept sweet tears onto the cutting board. The first bite made her eyes water—not just the sweetness, but the realization that some things don't get better with time. They just rot.

But she swallowed anyway. Because that's what living meant. Digesting the rotten parts and trusting something would grow from the decay.