The Last Papaya

Maya sat on the balcony of her Manila hotel room, splitting open a papaya she'd bought from a street vendor.

The fruit dripped down her chin, its sweetness overwhelming against the thick tropical air. She was flying home tomorrow—back to Seattle, back to the apartment she'd shared with Ethan for seven years, back to collect her things and finally sign the papers.

A storm was gathering. Lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the harbor in sudden, violent flashes. Each bolt was like a photograph—here and gone, leaving only afterimages in her vision.

She thought about the bear. Not the animal, but what Ethan used to call it when life became too much—when his mother died, when he lost his job, when the depression would curl him into himself on the couch for days. "I can't bear it," he'd say, and she would hold him, she would bear it for both of them.

Until she couldn't.

The papaya seeds were black and slick under her fingernails. She remembered their trip to Costa Rica, how he'd refused to try the fruit at the roadside stand, how he'd said "I don't like things I can't pronounce." She'd laughed then, thinking it was charming, his small stubbornnesses. Now she saw them for what they were: symptoms of something that would never be healed by love alone.

Lightning struck closer now, the thunder following almost instantly. The storm had arrived. She didn't move from her chair. She let the rain soak her tank top, let it wash away the sticky papaya juice, let it rinse the last seven years from her skin.

"I can't bear it," he'd told her the night she left, and she'd almost turned around. Almost.

She finished the fruit and tossed the skin into the darkness below. A bear sighting had been all over the news that morning—a spectacled bear, rare in these parts, wandering into someone's garden. Something where it didn't belong, looking for sustenance, finding only concrete and confusion.

She understood, suddenly, how it must have felt. The lightning flashed again, and this time she saw everything clearly: the empty apartment waiting for her, the bed she'd shared alone for months, the way she'd papered over their emptiness with patience and compromise and the quiet martyrdom of someone who thinks suffering is the same as devotion.

The storm passed as quickly as it had arrived. The air smelled of wet pavement and possibility.

Maya went inside and packed her bag.