Seeds of What We Lost

The padel court smelled of rubber and ozone, the kind of artificial honesty that comes from playing a sport you'd barely heard of six months ago. Marcus's backhand hit the wire fence with a metallic clang, and he laughed—that old laugh, the one that had once convinced me we'd be friends forever.

'Trust you to pick a game with walls,' I said, bending to retrieve the ball.

'Walls make you focus,' he replied, and something in his tone made me straighten too quickly. My lower back protested. We were forty now. The years had accumulated in places you couldn't see but definitely felt.

Afterward, we sat on the bench outside his apartment complex. He reached into his gym bag and produced a papaya, already quartered. The flesh was startlingly orange against the gray concrete.

'I remember when you couldn't stand these,' he said, offering me a slice.

'Tastes change.' I took it. 'People do too.'

'Yes.' He wasn't looking at me. 'They do.'

The papaya was sweet, cloying, exactly the flavor of something that wanted to be loved. We'd met at twenty-two in a shitty rental with cockroaches and dreams the size of continents. We'd promised to build something. Instead, we'd built lives in different cities, different orbits, sending texts that grew shorter by the year.

'Why did you call me?' I asked finally. 'After all this time?'

Marcus's fingers were sticky with juice. He wiped them on his shorts, a gesture so familiar it made my chest ache.

'My mother died last month,' he said. 'She was the one who got me into padel. She used to cut papaya for breakfast every Sunday.' He looked at me then, and I saw it—all the things he hadn't said. 'I didn't know who else to call who knew me before.'

Before the promotion. Before the divorce. Before whatever self he'd become.

I ate the rest of my slice in silence. The seeds were small, black, useless things.

'Same time next week?' I asked, and his relief was almost visible.

'Same time,' he said.

But we both knew appointments are not the same thing as being known.