The Mathematics of Leaving

The orange peels were still on the coffee table where David had left them three mornings ago, curled into themselves like dead insects. I'd been staring at them for twenty minutes, calculating the exact moment I'd stopped caring enough to throw them away.

"You're always running," he'd said during our last fight, words thrown like a baseball he expected me to catch. I hadn't. That was the problem, apparently—my reflexes were all wrong. I'd duck when I should have stepped in, stepped away when I should have held ground.

The apartment was too quiet without his cat, Barnaby, who'd evidently been more his than ours. David had taken the cat but left the bear figurine—the one from his Czech grandmother, its ceramic glaze cracked across the muzzle. It sat on the shelf above our bed, judging me with painted eyes.

I should have been at work. Instead, I was having what my mother would call a quarter-life crisis and what I preferred to think of as a necessary emotional convulsion. My phone buzzed—third time. Mark from accounting, wondering where the hell I was. We had that presentation. The client who loved baseball metaphors and aggressive enthusiasm.

I stood up and started pacing, then running in place, then actually running—out the door, down the stairs, into the street. The autumn air hit me like ice. I ran until my lungs burned, past the bodega where we'd bought morning coffee, past the park where we'd watched kids play baseball that one perfect Sunday in May, before everything started curdling into resentment and silence.

An orange leaf skittered across my path. I stopped running.

David had loved the color orange. Wore it, ate it, painted our bedroom wall a shade called "Tangerine Dream" that had been my first clue we might be incompatible. I'd hated that wall.

I walked back slowly, climbed the stairs, threw the peels away. Took the bear figurine down and put it in a box. Texted Mark: "Family emergency. Need two days."

Then I called my mother. "I think I'm going to be single for a while," I told her.

"Good," she said. "Learn to like your own company first."

The wall really did look terrible. But I'd deal with it tomorrow.