Screens and Seeds

Marcus stood in the produce aisle at 11:47 PM, clutching a papaya like it might save him. The fluorescent lights hummed their corporate lullaby as his iphone buzzed against his thigh—Slack channels from three time zones, his boss's "urgent" that wasn't, his ex-girlfriend's instagram story showing someone new's hand on her waist.

He felt like a **zombie**, honestly. Not the brain-eating kind, but the slow erosion kind—the kind that used to be an architect who believed buildings could shape human joy, now reduced to managing spreadsheets about buildings that would never exist. He'd taken to calling himself "The Vitamin King" in his head, his bathroom counter a graveyard of supplements: D3 for the windowless office, B-complex for the burnout, magnesium for the sleep that never came.

The papaya was soft when he pressed it, yielding. He'd never bought one before. Sarah had loved them—her fingers sticky-sweet with juice on Sunday mornings, laughing at him for his habitual toast and eggs. He'd bought it on impulse, some desperate bid for sensory input that wasn't blue light and HVAC air.

His iphone lit up: *U R coming tomorrow right?* from a colleague he'd never actually met. Another day of video calls where he'd mute himself and stare at his vitamin bottles on the bathroom counter, wondering when he'd started treating his body like a machine that needed maintenance rather than a life that needed meaning.

He cut the papaya in his apartment that smelled of takeout boxes and unwashed sheets. Scooped the seeds into a bowl—slick, black, strange. Ate one segment standing over the sink. The flavor hit him like a physical blow: honey and earth and something painfully, impossibly alive.

For a moment, he wasn't a zombie. He was just a man in a kitchen at midnight, weeping over a fruit he didn't even like, because for thirty seconds, he felt something that wasn't exhaustion or dread or the hollow ache of being thirty-three and wondering how you got here.

His iphone chimed from the counter. He didn't pick it up. He ate another segment of papaya, juice running down his chin, and let himself remember what it felt like to be hungry.