The Papaya Summer

The lightning strike that took your father was three years ago tomorrow, and I'm still eating papaya for breakfast every morning like he used to make. It's become this ritual—scooping out the black seeds, sprinkling lime, standing at the kitchen counter watching the sky for something that never comes.

"You're going to be late," Mara calls from the bedroom. Her voice is sharp this morning, already halfway to the office in her head. We've been having the same fight for weeks—the promotion she deserves, the one I might get instead. The office politics have turned our bedroom into a battlefield of silences and resentments.

"I know," I say, scraping the last of the papaya from the skin. I should feel guilty about the promotion, but I don't. That's the worst part.

At work, the baseball tickets from the regional manager sit on my desk like an accusation. Box seats. Tonight's game. You would have loved them—you who taught me to keep score by hand, who explained the poetry of a well-turned double play. I haven't been to a game since the funeral. Haven't wanted to sit in a crowd and feel the absence beside me like a phantom limb.

Mara stops by my cubicle around three. "Did you hear?"

"Hear what?"

"They're announcing tomorrow. The promotion." She studies my face, looking for something—guilt, reassurance, I don't know. "My mother says I should be prepared either way. That's what she does when she can't sleep—goes through scenarios, imagines outcomes until she's exhausted enough to rest. It's why she started eating papaya at night, did I ever tell you? Something about magnesium and sleep."

The room tilts. "Your mother eats papaya?"

"Every night." Mara's phone buzzes, and she checks it, distracted. "Look, about tonight—"

"The baseball game."

"Yeah. Do you want to go together? As friends? Or separately? I don't know what we're doing anymore, honestly."

Outside, lightning splits the sky, sudden and violent. I can feel the thunder in my chest, an echo of that night three years ago. Your father's heart stopping before his body hit the ground. The way love can end that fast—severed like a lightning strike, leaving you standing in the aftermath wondering how the world looks the same when everything has changed.

"Separately," I say. "I'll give you the tickets."

Mara nods, like she expected this. Later, I'll wonder if we ended before we actually ended, if the lightning struck months ago and we're just two leaves detaching, slow and inevitable.

Tomorrow, I'll buy papaya. Tomorrow, I'll call my mother. Tomorrow, I'll figure out how to be a person who eats breakfast and goes to work and learns to love things that can be taken away.

For now, I watch the rain and remember that some endings come like lightning—fast, bright, terrible—and others are like papaya, slow and sweet, until you wake up and realize the fruit is gone, and all you have is the taste of something you can't get back.