The Last Orange at Sunset

Maria adjusted her wool hat against the biting November wind, though the chill she felt had nothing to do with temperature. Three weeks after David's funeral, and she still caught herself reaching for her iPhone to share something—another sunset, another small victory—before remembering the empty space where his texts used to be.

They'd promised to be friends, after the divorce. The kind of friends who could still drink coffee together, who could still laugh about the burnt popcorn incident of 2019. But friendship, she was learning, was sometimes harder than love. Friendship required presence, and David had become increasingly absent long before the cancer.

She peeled the orange she'd bought from the corner bodega, its citrus scent sharp and immediate, cutting through the gray fog of her grief. David had loved oranges. Had eaten one every morning of their twelve years together, working the peel off in one perfect spiral, a small daily magic.

The office had become a kind of zombie apocalypse—everyone moving through meetings and emails and performance reviews with dead eyes, rehearsed smiles, souls quietly eroding by quarterly objectives. Maria had been one of them for years. David's diagnosis had cracked something open in her, made her question everything.

She stared at her phone, his last message still starred: *Don't forget to live, Mare.*

The orange segments burst in her mouth, impossibly sweet, achingly familiar. She wasn't ready to be friends with his memory yet. Some wounds needed their own timeline, their own geography. But as she watched the sun dip below the Manhattan skyline, painting the sky in impossible oranges and pinks, she understood what he'd meant.

Living wasn't about moving on. It was about carrying everything forward—all of it—into the next moment, the next breath, the next imperfect day.

She finished the orange, wiped her sticky fingers on a napkin, and typed a message to the friend she'd been avoiding since the funeral. *I miss him. I'm scared I'll never stop missing him.*

Then she took off her hat and let the wind mess her hair, and walked home into the gathering dark.