The Last Papaya

The papaya sat on the counter like an accusation, its skin mottled with yellow and green, precisely how she liked it. Too ripe now. He'd bought it yesterday, before she told him she was leaving.

"You're doing that thing," she said, not looking up from her coffee. "Where you stare at me like I'm a difficult math problem."

"I'm not." He turned on the faucet. Water rushed into the sink, drowning the silence between them. He washed the same dish three times.

"You are. And you bought that papaya even though you hate how it smells."

"It was on sale."

"Everything with you is about efficiency." She gestured toward the refrigerator, its door crowded with magnets and a single prescription bottle. "Even your feelings come in thirty-day cycles."

The vitamin bottle rattled when she opened the fridge door. Vitamin D3, 5000 IU. He'd started taking them last winter when he realized he hadn't been outside in weeks. Work, home, sleep, repeat. Sometimes he forgot what sunlight felt like on his face.

"I'm trying," he said. "I've been trying."

"Have you?" She stood up, her chair scraping against the floor. "Or have you just been going through the motions, checking boxes, expecting life to resolve itself like some goddamn spreadsheet?"

He looked at her then—really looked. The lines around her mouth that weren't there three years ago. The way she'd stopped wearing lipstick, stopped wearing the perfume he'd bought her their first anniversary. Stopped expecting anything from him except his paycheck and his presence in the bed they shared like roommates who'd long ago exhausted their conversation.

In the corner of the kitchen, his old baseball glove gathered dust on a shelf. He hadn't used it in years. Hadn't done much of anything except work, take vitamins, exist.

"I can change," he said. The words sounded hollow even to himself.

"That's just it." Her voice softened. "I don't think you can. I don't think you even know how anymore."

She walked past him, her shoulder barely brushing his arm, and left the apartment. The door clicked shut behind her. He stood at the sink, water still running, and watched the papaya on the counter grow softer in the morning light. Tomorrow, it would be too soft to eat. Tomorrow, it would be compost. But not yet. Not quite yet.