The Fruit of Leaving

Mara stood before the bathroom mirror, running her fingers through hair that still smelled like him—smoke and expensive cologne and the papaya conditioner he'd bought her three months into their marriage, back when he still remembered things like that. Now the bottle sat half-empty on the shower shelf, a relic of the man who used to be thoughtful.

She'd spent the past six months walking through her own life like a zombie, operating on automatic pilot: showing up to the marketing firm, nodding through meetings, coming home to an apartment that echoed with absence. Her mother kept saying she'd get over it. Her friends said she'd find someone better. But at thirty-four, after seven years together, Mara wasn't sure better existed. She wasn't sure she existed anymore, not really.

The orange sunset burned through the kitchen window as she packed the last box, something resonant and final about the way the light hit the cracked tile. She'd decided to leave the city, leave the ghost of their marriage behind, go somewhere papaya grew wild and strangers didn't look at her with that mixture of pity and curiosity.

"You're running away," David had said when she told him, his voice thin with that particular disappointment husbands reserve for wives they've already failed.

"I'm running toward," she'd corrected, though she hadn't known what that meant until this moment.

Mara twisted her hair into a knot, the way she used to before she started wearing it down because he preferred it that way. She picked up the papaya conditioner, considered leaving it, then dropped it into the trash. The sound was satisfactorily final.

Outside, the evening had turned that deep, bruised orange that comes right before true dark. Mara locked the door behind her, keys jingling like permission. She wasn't running away anymore, and she wasn't the walking dead. She was just a woman with a one-way ticket to somewhere new, finally awake after a long, numb sleep.