The Papaya at the Edge of the Pool

The apartment complex pool shimmered with the artificial blue of a life I no longer recognized. I stood at the edge, nursing a warm beer, feeling like a zombie haunting my own existence. Three months after the divorce, and I was still attending these Friday gatherings because stopping meant admitting defeat.

"Hey, Mark!" someone called. I waved automatically, the motion practiced and hollow. Inside, I was rotting.

That's when I saw the papaya sitting on the picnic table, bright orange against the chipped plastic. Sarah's favorite fruit. She used to eat them every morning, kneeling on our kitchen floor, juice running down her arms, laughing at her own mess. Now she was someone else's kitchen-floor-laugh.

A gray cat materialized from the bushes, emaciated but dignified. It regarded me with yellow eyes that seemed to know everything—how I'd stopped writing, how I'd started drinking before noon, how I'd forgotten what it felt like to want anything. The cat jumped onto the bench, sniffed the papaya, and looked at me as if asking: *Is this all that's left?*

I realized I was crying, silent and shameful, while people played volleyball behind me. The cat inched closer, and for the first time in ninety days, I wanted something—to touch it, to feel something alive that wasn't this aching performance of being fine.

The papaya sat between us like an offering. Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I'd buy one, eat it kneeling on the floor, and remember how to make a mess of things again. Tomorrow, I'd stop being a zombie haunting the pool's edge. The cat purred against my leg, and some small, buried part of me began to wake up.