The Art of Leaving

The baseball sat on his nightstand, a weathered thing from a championship game he'd played at twenty-two. Ten years later, David traced the stitching with his thumb, wondering when exactly his life had started feeling like something borrowed, something he was waiting to return.

Sarah was in the bathroom again. He could hear her cutting her hair in sharp, decisive snips — the sound of a marriage ending. When she emerged, her dark locks fell to the kitchen floor like dead leaves. She'd chopped it all off, right at the jawline. She looked startlingly young and painfully unfamiliar.

"I'm going running," she said, not meeting his eyes. "Then I'm staying with Maya."

Their golden retriever, Buster, sensed it first. He pressed his wet nose against David's knee, whining softly, as if apologizing for telegraphing the collapse before David had acknowledged it.

David opened the refrigerator to make himself busy, to create the illusion of routine. He reached for the spinach he'd bought yesterday, planning to cook them both dinner. Now the bag sat in his hand like an accusation — the fresh, healthy greens for a life that no longer existed here.

"You don't have to go," he said quietly. "We can —"

"You're still pitching to an empty stadium, David." She zipped her jacket. "I stopped watching the games three years ago."

The door clicked shut. Buster sighed and rested his chin on David's foot.

Later that night, David found himself at a bar, watching baseball on a television that flickered with something like sympathy. The pitcher threw a perfect curve ball, and David thought about how some throws were meant to be caught, and others were meant to break something, to teach you that not everything in life could be fielded cleanly.

He ordered another drink. He thought about Sarah's hair against his pillow, about the spinach wilting in his crisper drawer, about the way Buster followed him from room to room now, as if afraid David might disappear too.

Sometimes running toward something new meant running away from something you'd outgrown. He raised his glass to the television, to the pitcher on the mound, to the curve ball that had finally, finally taught him how to miss.