The Art of Floating Alone

The papaya arrived on a white porcelain plate, arranged with the precision of a small, edible monument. Elena had ordered it from room service because it seemed like something a person who had her life together would eat. Something vibrant and full of purpose, unlike the hollowed-out version of herself currently occupying suite 412.

She was supposed to be here with David. This was the trip—the luxurious Belize resort that had been bookmarked on her browser for months, the reward for surviving wedding planning, the honeymoon before the actual wedding. Now it was just her, the papaya, and the crushing silence of a cancelled future.

Down by the infinity **pool**, guests performed their leisure like carefully choreographed dances. Elena watched from her balcony as a woman in her twenties positioned herself for the perfect photograph, adjusting her bikini, tilting her chin toward the sun, holding the pose until her companion captured whatever version of joy she wanted the world to believe existed. Everyone was pretending. Everyone was composing their lives into frames and captions and carefully curated moments.

Elena's phone buzzed. Her mother, again.

Have you tried taking **vitamin** D supplements? Depression can be chemical, you know. Sometimes it's not about David, it's about your levels.

She deleted the text. Everything had become a fixable thing. A supplement. A therapy session. A meditation app. A juice cleanse. There was something exhausting about the assumption that her pain could be solved like a math equation, that her grief was merely a deficiency to be corrected.

The papaya sat there, mocking her with its brilliant orange flesh, its black seeds like tiny eyes watching her refusal to participate in her own healing.

She carried the plate down to the pool. The water was impossibly blue, the kind that exists only in photographs and expensive resorts. She found a lounge chair in the corner, far from the families and couples, and took a bite of the papaya. It was impossibly sweet, faintly musky, nothing like the papaya she'd bought in Ohio that tasted like disappointment and winter.

A man in his forties swam laps in the pool, his stroke rhythmic and relentless. Back and forth, back and forth, cutting through the water like he was trying to escape something, or perhaps move toward it. Elena watched him and felt a strange kinship. They were all just moving through medium—water or air or time—trying to stay afloat.

She finished the papaya. The sun beat down on her skin, and she closed her eyes, listening to the splash of the swimmer, the distant laughter of children, the soft clinking of glasses at the pool bar. For the first time since she'd called off the wedding, she didn't feel like she was waiting for something to begin or something to end.

She was just here. The papaya was sweet. The sun was warm. And somehow, in the strangest way, that was enough.