Salt Water Seasons

The papaya sat on the white ceramic plate, its orange flesh glistening like a promise I couldn't keep. Martin was already in the pool, doing laps, his movements cutting through the water with mechanical precision. I watched him from our balcony, my vitamin organizer spread before me on the table like a fragile mosaic—DHA, CoQ10, the ever-present folic acid, all the little capsules that were supposed to fix what was broken inside me.

'You coming?' he called later, dripping wet, his skin sun-darkened after three days in St. Lucia.

I shook my head, picked at my breakfast—papaya, spinach, some other green thing I'd forced myself to love because the fertility forums said anti-oxidants mattered. Everything had become a calculation. My body was a project, a problem to be solved.

That afternoon, I finally joined him in the water. We swam together, side by side, but the distance between us felt vast. He was still thinking about the vacation he'd planned, the romantic getaway that was supposed to restart something that had never really begun. I was thinking about the appointment next week, the specialist, the invasive procedures, the way medical professionals looked at you with a mixture of pity and professional detachment.

'You're tense,' Martin said, treading water beside me. The ocean stretched dark beyond the pool's edge.

'I'm fine.' I ducked under the water, let the silence envelope me, held my breath until my lungs burned. When I surfaced, he was watching me with that expression—the one that meant he knew something was wrong but didn't want to ask.

That night, I told him. About the stopped cycles. About how his sister's pregnancy announcements felt like knives. About how I couldn't keep pretending this was a vacation when it felt like a prison sentence.

He didn't say anything for a long time. Then he reached for my hand across the hotel bed. 'We don't have to fix anything,' he said. 'We can just... swim.'

I thought about the papaya at breakfast, how I'd forced myself to eat it because somewhere I'd read that tropical fruits were good for circulation, for hope, for things that might never happen. Tomorrow, I thought, I would order whatever I wanted. Tomorrow, I would just swim.