The Last Papaya

Elena sat on the balcony of the honeymoon suite she'd booked alone, watching the sun dip below the Pacific. The sky burned orange, the color of rust and old wounds. Behind her, on the table, sat a halved papaya, its flesh glistening like something that had been sliced open—much like her marriage.

She'd become something of a zombie these past six months, moving through the motions of her corporate law practice while her heart performed its duties mechanically, efficiently, without feeling. David had always called her stubborn, charging into arguments like a bull in a china shop, unwilling to bend until something shattered. This time, that something had been them.

The papaya had been David's favorite. He'd eaten it every morning of their ten years together, scooping out the black seeds with a silver spoon, making up stories about each one. That seed's going to be a philosopher, he'd say. That one's definitely an astronaut.

Elena picked up her martini—olives twisting in the glass like tiny bodies in formaldehyde—and watched a palm frond scratch against the railing. The sound was intimate, almost obscene. She'd flown to Cabo because this was where they were supposed to come for their anniversary. Instead, she was drinking alone, eating his fruit, surrounded by couples who looked at her with something that hovered between pity and judgment.

Her phone buzzed on the table. David's name lit up the screen.

She'd already decided what to tell him: that she was done being the bull in their china shop. That she was ready to be something softer, something that could bend without breaking. That she missed him—missed this, missed them, missed the way he'd made up stories about fruit seeds like their future was something you could playful invent rather than something you survived.

But the papaya sat there, cut open and waiting, and Elena found she couldn't make the call. Not yet. Some things needed to be experienced alone before they could be shared again. She took a bite of the fruit, sweet and strange against her tongue, and watched the orange sky deepen into purple, feeling herself begin to wake from the long sleep of the past half-year, feeling something like hope begin to beat again in her chest.