The Papaya Season

The papaya sat on the counter, its yellow-green skin mocking me with promises of sweetness I couldn't taste. Not anymore. Not since you walked out and took with you the ability to find joy in something as simple as fruit ripening on a windowsill.

I'd been swimming in that motel pool for three nights when Marcus found me. Not swimming really—more like dragging myself through water that smelled of chlorine and lost time. He sat on the edge, feet dangling in, and told me what happens when you cut the cable that keeps you tethered to everything you've known.

"You drift," he said. "That's what happens to things without anchors."

Marcus was never really my friend, though he liked to pretend otherwise in those early morning hours when we both couldn't sleep and the apartment walls felt too thin. He was your friend first, and somehow that made everything worse—the way he looked at me like I was a sphinx he needed to solve, a riddle wrapped in the mystery of why you'd chosen someone so fundamentally breakable.

"She told me about the cable," Marcus said that night by the pool. "How you found it inside yourself, this thing you kept pulled tight because you were so goddamn afraid of what would happen if you let yourself feel everything all at once."

The papaya would be soft by now. Probably rotting. I haven't been back to the apartment since the night I finally let myself feel it—every loss I'd swallowed whole for thirty-five years, every heartbreak I'd pretended didn't hollow me out. All of it came up in the pool while Marcus watched, and I don't know if he was horrified or grateful that someone else was finally drowning instead of just pretending to know how to swim.

Some nights I still think about going back. To check on the papaya. To see if the cable I cut is still lying there on the floor where I dropped it. But Marcus was right about what happens when you sever what keeps you tethered. You don't just drift—you find out there was never really anywhere to go anyway.