The Geometry of Absence

The cat watched him from the kitchen counter, her amber eyes judging his life choices. She was Sarah's cat, technically, but Sarah had been gone three months now, leaving only her half of the mortgage and this judgmental animal.

Marcus peeled an orange, the citrus spray sharp in the silent apartment. He'd started buying oranges after she left—something about the ritual of it, the way the scent forced its way into your senses. You couldn't ignore an orange being peeled. You couldn't ignore the way your hands smelled of it for hours afterward.

"Should've bought a papaya," he said aloud, because talking to himself had become another post-Sarah habit. "Papayas are what functional people eat. Papayas say 'I have my life together.' Oranges say 'I'm having an existential crisis in my kitchen at 11 PM.'"

The cat began grooming herself, utterly unimpressed.

Tomorrow he would start the new job at the architectural firm, climbing the corporate pyramid again at thirty-eight, when most of his peers were already directors. The joke was that he'd spent his thirties building Sarah's career instead of his own. The truth was messier—he'd simply drifted, caught in the comfortable current of someone else's ambition.

He'd been swimming underwater for years, only surfacing when she announced she'd accepted the position in Singapore. Alone.

The orange segments were perfectly sectioned. He ate them one by one, standing at the window where they used to watch the sunset. Across the street, lights flickered in neighboring apartments. People with intact lives. People who bought papayas and had partners who didn't leave for island nations without them.

The cat jumped down and wound around his ankles, purring now, sensing the shift in him.

"Fine," Marcus said, wiping his sticky hands. "We start over. Both of us."

He'd swim to the surface this time. He'd climb that pyramid, not because Sarah wanted him to, but because he needed to see what was at the top. He'd learn to like papayas. He'd become someone who didn't need another person to complete the geometry of his life.

The cat meowed, as if in agreement, and followed him to bed—where, for the first time in months, he didn't sleep on Sarah's side of the mattress.