The Last Orange at Dawn

She sat on the balcony of the apartment they used to share, peeling an orange with methodical precision. The scent of citrus cut through the morning haze, sharp and alive—everything she wasn't. Her iPhone lay beside her coffee mug, screen dark, silent since Thursday's text: *I can't do this anymore.*

Three years, reduced to six words.

Inside, David's shirts still hung in the closet. She'd become a zombie in her own life, moving through meetings and grocery store aisles on autopilot, her body hollowed out by the slow starvation of their love. The bear of it—the weight—pressed against her chest every time she breathed.

Funny how grief could feel exactly like suffocation.

She'd been at the cabin when it ended. That weekend they'd planned to save their marriage, surrounded by pines and the distant possibility of renewal. Instead, they'd watched each other across the dinner table, two strangers who knew every inch of each other's bodies, every secret fear and petty resentment, but had forgotten how to speak.

*You look tired,* he'd said.

*I am,* she'd replied.

The orange pulped under her fingers. She ate a segment, the burst of sweetness almost painful against her tongue. Her phone buzzed—a work notification, nothing more. She watched the screen light up and fade, like hope, like trust, like the hundred small deaths that accumulate until you realize you've died too.

But something shifted as the sun crept over the horizon, painting the sky in bruises of pink and gold. She thought about the hiking trails David had loved, the way he'd point out animal tracks—deer, elk, once a bear scratching its back against a pine. *See how the world leaves its mark?* he'd say.

She left the half-eaten orange on the railing. It was something, wasn't it? This terrible aliveness. This capacity to feel everything.

Her phone buzzed again. Not David. Her sister.

*Thinking of you. Call if you need.*

She typed back: *I might.*

The zombie opened her eyes. The bear of grief didn't vanish—it never does—but it settled. It became something she could carry.

She stood, knees cracking, and went inside to pack his shirts into boxes. The work was waiting. So was the rest of her life.