The Last Grocery Run

The iPhone screen lit up at 2 AM with her name again. I stared at it like it might bite, this rectangle of glass that had carried three years of text arguments, make-up selfies, and ultimately the voicemail where she told me she'd found someone more "present." Someone who didn't work eighty-hour weeks building an app that would probably never launch.

I threw the phone in the drawer and went to the grocery store because normal people did normal things at normal hours, and I was desperate to feel normal again.

The fluorescent lights hummed. I stood in the produce section paralyzed by choices. Organic spinach. Conventional spinach. Baby spinach. What kind of person buys spinach at 3 AM? A person trying to convince themselves they're making good choices, that's who. I grabbed a bag—didn't even check the price—and dropped it in my basket next to a microwavable lasagna for one.

"Rough night?"

I turned. An older woman with hair the color of a sunset orange smile, reading a magazine in the next aisle. Her name tag said BARBARA but I misread it as BEAR at first. She looked like a bear, somehow. Soft and dangerous and possibly hibernating through her own emotional winter.

"Something like that," I said.

She nodded at my basket. "Spinach and processed cheese product. The breakfast of champions. Or people whose girlfriends left them for photographers who have time to hike on Sundays."

I stared at her. "Are you psychic?"

"No, just divorced three times." She wheezed a laugh. "You've got that look, honey. That 'I thought I had it figured out but apparently I don't' look. My first husband left me for his secretary. Second one drank himself into an early grave. Third one just... faded. Like an old photograph left on a dashboard."

She pointed her magazine at me. "Here's what nobody tells you: heartburn from bad decisions eventually passes. But you don't forget the flavor."

I bought the spinach. I bought the lasagna. I went home and ate them together at the kitchen table she'd picked out from IKEA, the one we'd argued about putting together. The spinach was bitter. The lasagna was salty. Together they tasted exactly like moving on.