The Orange Peels

She's been running for three years now—not the physical kind, though she jogged every morning until her knees gave out. This was the endless sprint through days that blurred into weeks, through relationships that dissolved like sugar in cold water. Always running from the stillness where thoughts lived.

That Tuesday, as she peeled an orange in her sterile apartment, the spray of citrus hit her eyes and she wept. Not from the sting—God, she wished it were that simple—but from the sudden violent memory of him. How he'd peel oranges for her, fingers stained with juice, leaving the rind in one perfect spiral like a promise he couldn't keep.

The cat, a stray she'd taken in during the first brutal winter after he left, jumped onto the counter and nudged her hand. Its name was Buddy, which was ridiculous because they were nothing alike. She was still running; he had simply stopped. That was the difference between them. He understood that sometimes the only way forward was to stand still in the wreckage and let it pass through you.

She'd been running from that lesson for a thousand days.

The orange sat on the counter in segments, looking like something undone. Like her.

"I'm tired," she said aloud. The cat blinked, unimpressed.

She wasn't talking about the run anymore. She was talking about the leaving, the apartments, the men who were all wrong but felt right for a night, the perpetual motion sickness of a life in transit. The running that wasn't movement at all—it was avoidance, disguise, a brilliant trick she'd played on herself until this moment with a piece of fruit and an animal who had never once asked her to be something she wasn't.

She ate the orange. It was bitter, perfect, real.

Outside, the sun was setting—orange and violent and beautiful, colors bleeding into each other like the truth she'd finally stopped running from. Some things end. Some things begin. And sometimes, you just have to sit still and let the juice sting your eyes.