Photosynthesis in the Dark

Maya picked at the spinach wilting in her salad, watching droplets of condensation slide down her water glass like the minutes of her thirty-third year. The restaurant was too loud, full of people who still believed in the possibility of being chosen.

"You're not listening," David said. His voice had that edge—that particular frequency of disappointment she'd memorized after seven years together.

"I am." She wasn't. She was thinking about the cat, Barnaby, back at their apartment. How he'd howled when she left, sensing something. Animals always knew before you did.

"You've been a zombie for months, Maya. I say words and they just... bounce off. You're here but you're not here."

Zombie. The word settled between them like a bone. He wasn't wrong. Some part of her had died last winter when her mother did, and the rest of her was just animating the corpse—going to work, making dinner, having conversations she couldn't feel. The grieving process everyone promised would get easier had instead settled into something permanent. A low-grade fever of absence.

She looked at the spinach again. Dark green. Alive, once. Growing toward something it couldn't see.

"My mother used to say I was like a plant," Maya said finally. "That I needed light to survive. But I've been operating on pure stored energy. Just... existing."

David reached across the table, his fingers grazing hers. The first real touch in months. "Then let's find you some light. Whatever that means."

Barnaby was waiting by the door when she got home, his orange fur luminous in the hallway's yellow light. He wound around her ankles, purring like a small engine, demanding—what? Dinner? Attention? Or just acknowledgment that she had returned, that whatever darkness she'd walked through, she was still here, still capable of being seen.

She scooped him up, buried her face in his fur. He smelled like dust and sunlight and the stubborn persistence of living things.

"Okay," she whispered to the empty apartment. "Okay."

The spinach lay untouched in the restaurant's trash can. But Maya, for the first time in months, felt something like hunger.