The Last Papaya

Marcus sat across from Elena at the Vietnamese café, watching her dissect a papaya with surgical precision. They hadn't spoken since David's funeral two years ago.

"You look like a zombie," she said, not unkindly. "Corporate America finally chewed you up?"

He laughed, startled by her directness. "Something like that. I'm still at the firm. Doing mergers and acquisitions." His iPhone buzzed on the table. "Sorry."

"Don't apologize. That's just your leash."

She pushed a wedge of papaya toward him. "Taste it. It's the first thing from the garden that actually grew. David planted the tree. He'd be happy something finally took."

Marcus took a bite. Sweet, slightly musky, impossibly vivid against the gray backdrop of his life. "It's perfect."

"You remember that trip to Spain?" Elena asked, her eyes distant. "When we saw those bulls in the field? You said they looked like they knew something we didn't. About being alive."

"I was twenty-five and full of bull," Marcus said. "I thought I had everything figured out."

"And now?"

"Now I'm forty-three and I don't know anything. Except that I don't want to be this person anymore." He looked at his phone, another notification lighting up the screen. "But I don't know how to stop."

Elena reached across the table and took his hand. "David used to say the same thing. Until he did stop. He quit the partnership, planted that papaya tree, spent his last year actually living."

Marcus felt something crack open in his chest. "I miss him."

"Me too." She squeezed his hand. "But he'd want us to stop being zombies, Marcus. Starting now."

He turned off his phone and ate the rest of the papaya, letting himself remember what it felt like to choose something real.