The Lightning in Papaya Season

The goldfish floated belly-up when I was seven, but I didn't cry then. I learned early that mourning something with a three-second memory seemed disproportionate. Yet here I am, forty-three and staring at a papaya in the breakroom, wondering if grief has an expiration date I missed.

"You going to eat that, or just contemplate its existential weight?"

Mark. Always Mark, with his baseball metaphors and careful smiles that never reach his eyes. We'd been something once—back when the office was smaller and we were younger—but now he's just the guy who steals my spinach from the communal fridge.

"It's the color," I said. "Same shade as Sarah's dress that night."

The lightning came without warning—no thunder, just that sudden flash illuminating everything we'd ignored for years. The missed dinners, the voice messages unanswered, the way she'd stopped asking about my day. They say lightning never strikes twice, but that night it found us both. Changed everything. Left me standing in the wreckage of a marriage I thought was solid, holding only the papaya she'd bought for breakfast the next morning.

I cut into the fruit now, its flesh orange-gold against the plastic knife. The breakroom hummed with fluorescent efficiency.

"Remember when we played that corporate softball game?" Mark asked, leaning against the counter. "You hit that home run, Sarah screaming from the bleachers. You looked like you could fly."

"I hit a baseball. Once."

"Yeah. Once."

The goldfish had been Sarah's idea. Something to teach responsibility, she'd said, but it died in three days anyway. Maybe everything dies in three days if you're not paying attention. Maybe love, like memory, has a shorter shelf life than we want to admit.

"I'm leaving," I said suddenly. The words hung there like lightning waiting to strike.

Mark straightened. "The company?"

"The city. The life. The man who became someone Sarah stopped recognizing somewhere between the goldfish and the papaya."

He nodded slowly. For once, he didn't have a baseball analogy. Just stood there as I threw the uneaten fruit in the trash and walked out into a world where lightning still strikes, but at least now, I'm watching for it.