The Papaya We Never Ate

The iPhone buzzed on the nightstand at 2 AM, its blue light cutting through the darkness of Sarah's apartment like a cold accusation. She knew who it was before she even looked.

"You're still awake," Marcus's text read.

"You're still alive," she replied, then wished she hadn't. They'd been dancing around each other for months—since the promotion that had made him her boss, since the drunken night at the holiday party when everything almost changed, since she'd started feeling like a zombie walking through her own life.

"I'm leaving Elena," he typed back.

Sarah's thumb hovered over the screen. This was the moment she'd been waiting for, wasn't it? The moment her college friend—the one she'd secretly loved through his marriage, through her own failed relationships—would finally be available. But instead of triumph, she felt hollowed out.

"We said we'd go to Costa Rica, remember?" she wrote instead. "That summer after graduation. We were going to eat papaya on the beach every morning."

"I remember," Marcus replied. "You were so obsessed with trying fresh papaya. You'd never had it."

"I still haven't."

The silence stretched between them, transmitted through fiber optic cables and cell towers, a distance measured in years of bad timing and cowardice. Sarah thought about the papaya—how it had become this mythic thing between them, this symbol of all the trips they'd never taken, all the mornings they'd never shared, all the possibilities that had rotted on the vine of their cowardice.

"I could come over," Marcus wrote.

Sarah looked at her reflection in the dark window—thirty-seven, successful, utterly exhausted by the performance of being okay. She thought about what would happen: he would leave his wife, they would finally be together, and within six months they'd realize they'd fallen in love with the idea of each other, preserved in amber since age twenty-two. They were both zombies really, walking around with dead dreams, mistaking familiarity for fate.

"The papaya probably wouldn't have been that good anyway," she typed. "Some things are better as fantasies."

"Sarah—"

"Get some sleep, Marcus. We have that meeting at nine."

She turned off her phone and lay in the dark, finally ready to let the dead stay dead, accepting that the sweetest fruit is always the one you never taste.