Supplements
The papaya sat on the counter, its skin mottling with brown spots where her fingers had pressed into it yesterday. Three days ago, it had been perfect. Three days ago, so had they.
Maya stood in her kitchen at 7 AM, wearing his baseball cap backward because she hadn't washed her hair since Tuesday. The brim cast a shadow over the cutting board where she'd laid out spinach—wilting now, like everything else in her refrigerator, like everything else in her life.
Her iPhone lit up again.
*Can we talk?*
She'd blocked him twelve times. Each time, he found a new number. This was number thirteen. Unlucky, she thought, then cursed herself for the superstition. He'd always mocked her for being irrational.
Maya picked up the knife and sliced through the papaya's flesh. Inside, seeds clustered like a swarm of thoughts she couldn't organize. Black, slippery, impossible to grasp. She scooped them out and watched them fall into the trash can with a wet thud.
*Please. Just five minutes.*
She opened the medicine cabinet and lined up her supplements on the counter. Vitamin D, because she never went outside anymore. Magnesium, because her muscles were always tense. Iron, because she'd stopped eating red meat when they started dating, and he'd never noticed.
The vitamin bottle was nearly empty. She'd been taking three a day instead of one, as if dosage could compensate for deficiency.
The phone buzzed again. A photo this time.
Maya didn't look. She knew what it was. The same photo he'd sent every time they'd broken up before. The two of them at the beach, her wearing that ridiculous straw hat he'd bought her as a joke, both of them laughing like the world was something they could navigate together.
She deleted it without opening it. Block number fourteen.
The spinach went into the pan with olive oil that hissed and popped. She added the papaya, though she knew it was wrong, though she knew sweetness didn't belong with bitterness, though she knew some things couldn't be forced into compatibility no matter how much you wanted them to work.
She ate standing up, wearing a hat that wasn't hers, in an apartment that felt too large, swallowing vitamins her body couldn't absorb, trying to remember how to be whole alone.