The Papaya Season

Elara sliced the papaya alone, the juice running down her wrists like something forgotten. The kitchen was too quiet now. Six months ago, Marcus would have been leaning against the counter, stealing pieces when she wasn't looking, laughing when she swatted his hand away.

Now he was a sphinx inscribed in the leather armchair, silent and inscrutable, his eyes fixed on nothing she could see.

She took her vitamins with a glass of water—D, B-complex, omega-3—the daily ritual of maintenance for a body that felt increasingly hollow. What vitamin could shore up a marriage? What supplement could restore what had calcified between them?

"I'm going swimming," she said to his back.

No response. The sphinx remained sphinx-like.

The pool at the Y was empty at 5 AM. She slipped into the water, the shock of cold almost violent against her skin. Swimming had become her running and her staying still—her daily escape from the apartment, from the weight of unsaid things, from the man who used to hold her wet hair back when she emerged from the shower and now couldn't meet her eyes across the dinner table.

She'd tried running. She'd tried running literally, until her knees protested. She'd tried running from it emotionally, burying herself in work, in books, in the careful architecture of denial. But the water didn't let her lie to herself. In the pool, everything stripped away.

Breaststroke, breaststroke, breathe. The papaya on the counter, uneaten. The vitamins on the windowsill, useless against this particular ache. The sphinx in the armchair, growing more stone-like by the day.

She touched the wall, turned, pushed off again. Her limbs moved through water that felt like amniotic fluid, like drowning, like rebirth. She thought of leaving him. She thought of staying. She thought of how love could erode like coastline, gradual and inexorable, until you looked back and wondered where the land had gone.

When she climbed out, shivering, the sky was just beginning to gray. She would go home. She would eat the papaya before it turned. She would ask him if he wanted coffee, and maybe this time, the sphinx would speak.

Or maybe she would finally stop waiting.