Fruit of the Departed

The papaya sat on the counter for three days before I could bring myself to touch it. It was a peace offering from Maya—left on my doorstep the morning after she'd packed her things into boxes and driven away in that rattling Honda we used to share. A joke between us, from that trip to Kauai where we'd gotten food poisoning and spent two days in a beachside motel, delirious and in love and making terrible jokes about tropical fruit being nature's revenge.

Now the papaya was ripening on my kitchen counter, its skin turning from green to sickly yellow, like a bruise blossoming. I hadn't eaten properly in a week. My fridge held takeout containers and condiments. My friend Marcus kept texting me memes I didn't open. I'd told him I needed space, which was code for "I don't know how to be the person you knew anymore."

The cable guy was coming between noon and four. Another thing Maya used to handle—the logistics of adult life, the appointments, the passwords written in her neat cursive in a notebook I'd found wedged between the cookbooks. When the doorbell rang at 12:47, I answered wearing boxers and a stained t-shirt, my hair unwashed, my eyes rimmed with red from crying or lack of sleep or both.

"Cable's out again?" he asked, already heading toward the living room. He looked like my father—same graying temples, same gut straining against his uniform. "You'd be surprised how many people lose it when the internet goes. Can't stream their shows, can't doomscroll. Like the world's ended."

"I don't watch TV," I said. "It's for my roommate. Who moved out."

He worked silently after that, crouched behind the TV, his movements practiced and efficient. I watched him and remembered something Maya had told me once, drunk on wine in that bathtub we'd wedged into on our third anniversary. "You bear things," she'd said, tracing the line of my jaw. "You just take it and take it and never say anything. Someday you're going to crack down the middle."

She'd left two weeks ago. The cable was fine. I'd just needed someone to come to the apartment, needed to say the words "my roommate moved out" out loud, needed to prove that I could still speak sentences that weren't just questions about where she'd gone or why or when she was coming back.

The cable guy stood up, wiping his hands on a rag. "All set. Loose connection in the wall. You're good now."

"Thanks," I said.

He paused at the door. "You've got a piece of fruit on your counter turning into science. Might want to deal with that."

After he left, I cut the papaya open. It was overripe, the flesh soft and bruising under my knife. I ate it standing over the sink, letting the juice run down my chin, thinking about Kauai and food poisoning and how love can turn into something unrecognizable if you wait too long to deal with it. The apartment was silent. The cable worked perfectly. I was learning, finally, how to bear the weight of things I couldn't fix.