The Color of Leaving

The bull of a boss stood over my desk, blocking the morning light. His face flushed the color of impending heart attack as he picked apart the presentation I'd spent three weeks perfecting.

"This isn't what we discussed, Marcus. Not even close."

I nodded. Said I'd fix it. Said the words that had become a mantra: whatever you need, however you want it, I'll make it right.

That evening, Sarah met me at the door with a suitcase and an orange — the last one from the tree we'd planted together, now buckling under its own weight in the backyard. She'd squeezed it already. The skin was broken, releasing a scent that hit me like a physical force.

"I can't do this anymore," she said. "You're taking vitamin supplements for a life you're not actually living."

I didn't fight her. I couldn't. She was right, and we both knew it.

After she left, I found myself at the kitchen table at 3 AM, staring at that single orange. The cat — her cat, technically — jumped onto the table and nudged my hand with a demanding head. We were both abandoned now, left behind by the same person.

"Bull," I said aloud, testing the weight of the word. It was what my grandfather called my father when he'd had too much whiskey. It was the name of the statue in the town square where Sarah and I had our first kiss. It was the force that had been trampling through my life for years, and I'd been letting it happen.

I peeled the orange. Section by section, I ate it standing over the sink, juice dripping onto my shirt like unwanted tears. The taste was impossibly bright, almost violent in its aliveness. It had been growing in our backyard while our marriage rotted from the inside out. That seemed profoundly unfair.

The cat watched, then jumped down and walked to the back door, meowing to be let out.

I opened the door. The night air was cold, but the orange tree was still there, silhouetted against a sky beginning to lighten with dawn. Hundreds of oranges hung suspended in that impossible space between night and day, each one containing seeds that could grow something entirely new.

I stepped outside barefoot. The dew froze my feet, and for the first time in years, I felt something real. Not the vitamin version of feeling — not the performance contentment, not the learned response, not the safe pattern — but something jagged and honest and terrified.

The cat wound around my legs, purring like a small engine. The bull would be waiting at the office in a few hours. But standing there in the orange-scented dark, I understood what Sarah had been trying to say: some things can't be supplemented. Some things have to be lived, or not at all. I reached up and picked another orange, heavier than it looked in my hand, and closed my fingers around the possibility of beginning.