The Orange Peeler

You don't notice becoming a zombie. It happens gradually—first you stop calling friends back, then you stop caring about the radio silence, then one morning you're standing in your kitchen at 6 AM peeling an orange and realize your hands are moving while your mind is somewhere else entirely.

She hadn't been just a friend. That was the problem. Elena had been the kind of friend who shows up at your door with wine when your promotion falls through, who sends you texts that make you laugh so hard you cry in office bathrooms, who knows what you sound like when you're truly happy. Now she was married to someone else, and you were bearing the weight of that particular grief alone, quiet as a secret.

Your hair started turning gray at thirty-two, which felt cosmic somehow, like your body was keeping pace with your internal landscape. You dyed it for a while, that box-color bullshit that never quite matches, until you realized you were trying to outrun something that was catching up anyway.

Now you peel oranges in the morning. It's the only thing that feels real. The spray of citrus oil, the bitter resistance of the pith, the way your fingernails stained—these are sensory details that anchor you to your body when everything else feels like you're watching someone else live your life. You work, you sleep, you exist. The office politics drone on like background radiation. Someone is always leaving, someone is always fucking someone they shouldn't, someone is always pretending they're not falling apart while presenting slides about Q3 projections.

Last week Elena invited you to dinner. You went. You watched her hand rest on her husband's arm, casual as anything. You drank good wine and talked about renovations and felt like a ghost haunting your own body, like you'd been dead for years and no one had the decency to bury you.

The orange is in your hand now, segments pulling apart. Bright against the gray light of another day that will be exactly like the one before it. You eat one piece. It's sharp and sweet and overwhelmingly itself. You take another. Somewhere in the distance, your phone buzzes. It's probably work. It can wait.