The Last Papaya

You were always the bull in everything—charging forward, horns lowered, convinced momentum was the same thing as direction. I was the bear, hibernating through your storms, waiting out the markets you crashed through without reading the prospectus.

We met at that terrible gallery opening where the sculptor had made a sphinx out of recycled circuit boards. You leaned against its pedestal and told me riddles were just questions without the courage to demand answers. I should have known then: you'd always solve me before you'd ever really see me.

Three years later, I'm sitting on our balcony with the papaya you bought yesterday from the market on 4th Street. You brought it home like a prize, cutting it open in the kitchen where the light caught the orange flesh like something embryonic. Look at this, you said. It's got seeds inside that look like little worlds.

You were already halfway out the door then—packing boxes in the hall, that new job waiting in a city where I'd never visited you. The papaya was an apology you couldn't speak.

Now it's overripe on the table. I cut into it and the juice runs down my wrist, sticky and absurdly sexual for a Tuesday morning alone. The sphinx would ask: what walks away on two legs but leaves its heart in a bowl of fruit?

I ate the whole thing standing over the sink, like you used to do when you couldn't sleep. Some part of me thinks if I consume your last gesture, I'll digest whatever it was we promised each other that night in the gallery. But sweetness turns to acid in the stomach. Always.

The market opened while I was chewing. I don't know which way it went. I only know that bulls and bears can share the same cage indefinitely, tearing at each other in circles, and neither one ever really wins.

The seeds go in the trash. That's all that's left of us now—something that might have grown, under different soil, in another life.