The Fruit of Waiting

The papaya sat untouched on the counter, its skin freckled with brown like age spots on a lover's hand. Sarah had bought it yesterday—some optimistic gesture at the grocery store, as if tropical fruit could fix what seven years of silence had broken. Now it mocked me from the kitchen, softening by the hour. I sliced through the orange sunset bleeding through the blinds, the knife's edge catching the last light. The apartment felt too large without her things. Her cable knit socks still lived in the bottom drawer, her palm prints ghosted the bathroom mirror. I turned on the TV, needing noise, anything to fill the hollow where her laugh used to echo. Baseball flickered across the screen—some college game from the Midwest, the crowd roaring like they'd never known loss. I watched a player adjust his cap, his palm pressed to his forehead, and remembered how Sarah would do that during arguments, her hand framing her face like she was trying to hold herself together. We'd met at a baseball game, actually. She'd spilled orange soda on my jeans, apologized with a papaya-colored lipstick smile, and somehow that was enough to build a life on. Now the fruit bowl held everything we couldn't say. I turned off the cable, let the papaya rot on the counter, and pressed my own palm against the cool window. Outside, the world kept turning. Inside, I was still waiting for something to ripen.