The Papaya Summer

Ellen found herself at forty-two, standing in the produce aisle of Whole Foods, weeping over a papaya. It wasn't the papaya's fault—it was perfect, mottled yellow-orange like the sunset she and David had watched from their balcony in Santa Monica seven years ago. The summer they'd promised each other they'd finally start trying for a baby. The summer everything fell apart instead.

She'd been thinking about that summer more lately. Maybe it was because she'd run into his sister at the **baseball** game last week—the Dodgers versus the Giants, David's team against hers. Ellen had been there with Mark, the nice accountant she'd been seeing for three months. Mark who touched her **hair** with gentle reverence, who listened when she spoke, who never made her feel like she was too much or too little or fundamentally wrong in some way she couldn't quite name.

'You look good, Ellen,' his sister had said, and Ellen had heard the unspoken thing: 'You look like you survived.'

She had survived. That was the terrible thing about it—she'd survived David leaving, survived the promotion she'd only taken because she needed to prove she could, survived turning into the kind of woman who ordered her **orange** juice with pulp because she'd learned to make small compromises with herself. Mark was another compromise. Nice. Safe. The kind of man who wouldn't **bear** down on her soul until something inside her cracked open.

Her phone buzzed. Mark. 'Dinner tonight? That new Thai place?'

Ellen looked at the papaya in her hand, this fruit that had traveled thousands of miles to end up here, in her grip, in this moment. She thought about David's hands, how he'd held her face that last morning, saying he loved her but couldn't do this anymore, couldn't be what she needed him to be. She'd screamed at him that she didn't know what she needed. She still didn't.

She put the papaya back. Some things, she decided, were better left in the past.

'Yes,' she texted Mark. 'Thai sounds perfect.'

And as she walked out of the store, papaya-less, into the blinding afternoon light, she understood: survival wasn't the same as happiness, but it was something. It was enough. For now, it had to be.