The Last Papaya

You never think about how heavy a person's absence can be until you're standing in their kitchen, trying to decide what to do with a bowl of fruit that's already beginning to soften.

Sarah had been dead for three days when I finally let myself into her apartment. We hadn't spoken in two years—not since the wedding reception where I'd drunkenly told her that marrying him was a mistake, that she was settling for a man who didn't see her. She'd looked at me with those devastating eyes and said, "At least he's here."

The worst part was that she was right. I'd left for New York two months later, chasing a promotion that felt like ascent but was really just escape.

Now I stood surrounded by her life—a collection of thrift-store art, mismatched mugs, books with cracked spines. A ceramic bear on the windowsill, its glaze chipped where her cat used to knock it onto the floor. I remembered buying it for her at a craft fair in college, when we were twenty and believed our friendship could weather anything, even geography, even mediocrity, even the slow erosion of telephone calls and unanswered texts.

On the counter, a papaya sat ripening in a blue bowl. She'd always loved them—said they tasted like somewhere she'd never been. Beside it, an orange, its skin beginning to wrinkle. I'd sent her a text the morning she died: *Thinking of you. Let's talk soon.* The same message I'd sent six times over the past year.

I sliced the papaya open, black seeds spilling onto my fingers like forgotten words. The flesh was sweet, faintly musky, overwhelming. I ate it standing at the counter, tears and juice dripping down my chin, because Sarah would have hated waste and because somewhere along the way, I'd forgotten how to be the friend she deserved.

Her phone buzzed in the bedroom—a reminder for an appointment she'd never make. And that was the truest thing about loss: not that people left, but that the world kept insisting they were still coming back.