The Last Orange You Gave Me

I should have known something was wrong when Maya stopped running. For three years, we'd met at the lake at dawn, her orange windbreaker cutting through the fog like some warning I couldn't translate. She was the friend who made me take vitamins when I forgot to eat, who left citrus on my desk during dark months.

Then came the Tuesday she didn't show up. No text. No call. Just her absence, heavier than any conversation we'd ever had.

I learned later from Sarah—our friend in common who never quite fit in our orbit—that Maya had been running to appointments, not away from them. The oncologist's office, not the lake. The vitamin deficiency was leukemia all along. Every orange I'd seen her peel, every supplement she'd pressed into my palm with that fierce intensity—she'd been stockpiling sunlight for herself while giving it away.

The worst part wasn't the diagnosis. It was the ending. She stopped returning calls. Deleted her social media. Moved apartments. Like she could outrun what was happening to her by cutting loose everything that reminded her of who she used to be. Including me.

I found her in a hospital room three weeks ago, smaller than I remembered, her skin paper-thin and translucent. An orange sat on her bedside table—the first one I'd seen near her in months.

"You're still taking them?" I asked, gesturing to the vitamin bottles lined up like soldiers on her windowsill.

She laughed, and it sounded like breaking glass. "No point now. Just habit."

We didn't talk about why she'd pushed me away. Some things are too small to say aloud when time is running out. I peeled the orange for her, section by section, and we watched the sun rise through hospital windows that were too clean to be real.

She died Tuesday at dawn. I went running anyway, through fog that looked like her old windbreaker, and understood finally: she hadn't been running from death. She'd been running toward something I couldn't see. And somewhere between the lake and the hospital, I'd forgotten to ask what.