The Papaya Summer

You never think about how much of a friendship lives in someone's hair until they're gone. Elena's was this wild dark halo that escaped every bun and ponytail she attempted, strands that would catch the light during our late-night dorm-room conversations about everything and nothing.

That was twenty years ago. Now I'm standing in the produce section of a Whole Foods in a city where I know almost no one, holding a papaya like it's a holy relic. It's absurd — I don't even like papaya. But Elena did, passionately, during that one summer we spent housesitting for her aunt in Tucson. We ate papaya with lime juice every morning for six weeks while the heat rose in waves off the desert floor.

She'd been dumped by someone she thought was the love of her life. I'd just failed out of my first graduate program. We were two fragments trying to make ourselves whole again, trading insomnia and cheap wine on a patio that smelled of creosote and longing.

One night, a minor league baseball game blared from a neighbor's radio somewhere down the street. The crack of the bat, the crowd's collective gasp — these sounds drifted through the darkness like weather. Elena turned to me, her face half-lit by the citronella candle we'd both forgotten to blow out.

"Do you think anyone actually knows what they're doing?" she asked. "Or do they just pick a direction and call it a plan?"

I didn't have an answer then. I don't have one now.

We lost touch somewhere in the blur of our thirties — the usual cascade of marriages, relocations, the slow drift of lives that no longer fit together like they once did. I heard through mutual friends that she died last year. Cancer. The kind that moves fast and doesn't negotiate.

I put the papaya in my cart, feeling ridiculous and tender all at once. Some griefs arrive like storm fronts; others are these small persistent aches that surface in the produce section on a Tuesday afternoon, demanding to be felt. I'll eat it for breakfast tomorrow with lime juice. Maybe then I'll finally understand what she was trying to tell me about directions and plans, about how friendship doesn't always end — sometimes it just changes shape, becomes something you carry instead of something you hold.