The Color of Before

Marcus sat alone at the corner table of corporate cafeteria, pushing limp spinach leaves around his plate with plastic fork. The spinach tasted like nothing—like everything else in his life since Miranda left. Three months of gray existence, each day indistinguishable from the last, moving through meetings and spreadsheets like some office zombie, hollowed out from the inside.

He'd almost forgotten the color of her hair—that impossible, vibrant orange she'd stopped dyeing when she made junior partner at the firm. "Professional expectations," she'd said in their bathroom mirror that final morning, scraping out the last of the henna paste. Her reflection showed him someone he'd never met. Someone who cared about golf and proper wines and whether the neighbors' lawns were manicured to regulation height.

That was the same morning she'd told him she'd met someone else. Someone who understood ambition. Someone who didn't still believe they could change the world.

A flash of orange caught Marcus's peripheral vision. He looked up, heart stupid, hopeful, childish—

A woman in a bright orange scarf walked past his table. Not Miranda. Of course not. But the color stopped him anyway, sent him back three years to their tiny apartment where Miranda had danced barefoot to Nina Simone, her orange wild around her shoulders, both of them drunk on cheap wine and possibility.

Marcus stared at his spinach salad and felt something crack open inside him. Not tears—he was too numb for that. Just recognition. He'd become everything they'd once sworn to fight against. And she? She'd become what she'd once despised.

The zombie across from him in the glass reflection of the cafeteria window blinked slowly.

Marcus pushed his chair back. It made a terrible screeching sound against the floor. Several colleagues looked up from their meals, their faces polite, concerned, hollow.

He walked out without finishing his lunch. Outside, the autumn sun was setting, painting the sky in impossible shades of burnt orange and gold, colors too wild for corporate calendars, too bright for people who'd forgotten how to look up.

Marcus took out his phone and scrolled to her number, his thumb hovering over the call button. For the first time in three months, he wasn't thinking about winning her back. He was thinking about whether either of them still existed worth finding.

The zombie in the window had blinked. But was it alive?