The Color of Goodbye

Sarah stood at the concession stand, her orange sundress bright against the drab concrete of the stadium. She hadn't worn this color in years—not since the night I told her, over lukewarm beers at this very ballpark, that I was sleeping with her sister.

I reached for the soda in her hand. "You came."

"Of course I came. You said it was important."

What could be important about two years of silence? What could matter between two people who had once promised to be friends forever, then spent a decade gradually disappointing each other?

The baseball game roared around us—some team against some other team, neither of ours anymore. We used to live for these games, back when we still believed in loyalty. Now the players looked like children playing a game that should have meant something.

"It's Mom," Sarah said, and the orange fabric seemed to shimmer under the harsh stadium lights. "She's selling the house."

A laugh escaped before I could stop it. Dark, bitter, inevitable. "Of course she is. The house where everything fell apart. The house where you chose him and I pretended it didn't matter."

"You were never my friend," she said quietly. "You were my judge."

The orange sunset gave way to floodlights, harsh and exposing. For the first time, I saw it clearly: I hadn't been protecting myself from betrayal. I had been protecting myself from admitting that I had been the one to walk away first, in a thousand small ways, in every judgment I never voiced.

"You're right," I said.

Sarah studied my face for a long moment. Then she smiled—sad, knowing, almost gentle.

"Goodbye, Mark."

I watched her orange dress recede through the crowd, a bright spark against all that gray, until she disappeared completely behind the sea of strangers. The baseball game continued without me. I stood alone at the concession stand and finally, after all these years, I began to let it all go.