The Last Papaya Summer

The papaya sat on my counter for three days, its skin mottling from green to angry yellow, like a bruise that wouldn't heal. Marco had brought it over the night before he stopped being my friend.

We'd watched the baseball game on his cable package—the expensive one with all the channels neither of us needed. The Mets were losing, again, and Marco kept saying this was their year, even though we both knew better. That was Marco: believing in things that had already given up on him.

"You gonna eat that?" he'd asked, pointing at the fruit bowl.

"Eventually."

"Papaya's good for you. Anti-inflammatory. My mom eats it every morning."

His mother had died two months earlier. That's when everything started to crack—when I suggested maybe he should talk to someone, and he looked at me like I'd offered him poison. Some friendships don't survive grief. They survive distance and bad loans and drunken fights, but they curl up and die when someone says the wrong thing at the wrong time.

The fight itself wasn't dramatic. He just stopped calling. Stopped coming over. I texted him after a week, then two weeks. Then I stopped too.

My cat, Binx, keeps jumping on the counter and sniffing the papaya. She's got more sense than me—she knows it's gone soft, fermented into something unrecognizable. She watches me from the kitchen table while I stare at my phone, Marco's last message still visible: "Thanks for everything."

It could mean anything. It could mean nothing.

Tonight the baseball game is on again—Mets versus Yankees, the rivalry that used to matter. I'm watching on my own cable subscription now, the one Marco talked me into getting four years ago when we moved into neighboring apartments. Every month I pay eighty dollars for sports I half-watch in an empty apartment.

The papaya has finally collapsed on itself, a soft depression where it touched the counter. Tomorrow I'll throw it out. But not tonight. Tonight I let the announcer's voice wash over me, let Binx curl against my leg, and pretend the empty seat beside me is just someone running late for the game.

Some ripening takes longer than others. Some things rot before you're ready to let them go.