The Fruit of waking Up

For three months, I'd been running from my marriage. Not literally—though the jogging helped. Just the daily erasure of twelve years, one foot in front of the other on the morning pavement while Marcus slept in our bed, the space between us growing wider by the week.

I met him at Whole Foods, of all places. I was standing paralyzed in front of the papayas when he reached past me, his arm brushing mine like an accident that wasn't one.

"The trick is the smell," he said, pressing one to his nose. "Like a rich woman's perfume. If there's no scent, there's no soul."

David sold insurance and lived alone in a condo with furniture too nice for one person. He made me feel like I'd been asleep for a decade, dreaming someone else's life.

"I'm leaving him," I told David two weeks later, over dinner. His kitchen smelled of roasted garlic and optimism. "I just don't know how."

He stirred his spinach—organic, locally grown, everything I wasn't—and didn't look up. "You're already gone, Lena. The rest is just paperwork."

The next morning, I came home to find Marcus sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by boxes. My running shoes sat by the door like a convicted criminal's belongings.

"You've been running for months," he said, voice flat. "I'm just letting you finish the race."

I realized then that I'd cast myself as the victim, the tragic heroine trapped in a loveless marriage. But I wasn't trapped. I was a bull in a china shop of my own making, destroying everything with the clumsy weight of my indecision. The cowardice wasn't in leaving—it was in waiting for him to make me brave.

"I'm sorry," I said. It sounded like nothing.

"I know," he said. "That's why you're going to stay at your sister's. I need the house to myself. To miss you, or not. I haven't decided yet."

That was six months ago. Sometimes I buy papayas now. They never taste like I expect them to—too musky, too strange, like fruit from another planet. But that's the point, isn't it? You don't get to choose what wakes you up. You just have to let it.