The Riddle of Hungover Mornings

Maya sat on her fire escape at 3 AM, eating papaya from a bodega that shouldn't have been open. The fruit tasted like somewhere she'd never been—tropical, improbable, deliberately sweet against the sour whiskey still coating her tongue. Below, Brooklyn slept except for the occasional car splashing through rain-slicked streets.

She felt like a zombie, and not the fun kind that consumed brains in summer blockbusters. The corporate kind. The kind that answered emails at midnight, that attended Zoom meetings with cameras off, that had forgotten what it meant to be hungry for anything except weekends and the occasional vacation that never materialized. Three years at the consulting firm and she'd become excellent at moving things from column A to column B while her soul calcified.

Then came the lightning—not the weather kind, though that would come later with the dawn storm. The lightning struck during her performance review yesterday afternoon. David, her boss, had asked why she'd stopped caring. And somewhere in her tired, rehearsed answer about team dynamics and challenging projects, she'd caught her own reflection in the glass wall behind him and hadn't recognized the woman staring back.

"What do you actually want?" he'd asked, and she'd realized she didn't have an answer. That was the riddle she'd been avoiding, personal sphinx perched on the edge of her consciousness, demanding she solve it or be devoured. What did she want?

She took another bite of papaya. A taxi honked somewhere. Her phone buzzed on the kitchen counter—work email, almost certainly. The zombie part of her wanted to check it. The part that had been struck by lightning yesterday sat still on the fire escape, fruit juice sticky on her fingers, and finally admitted she was ready to be done with this particular hunger.

The first real lightning of the storm cracked the sky open. She went inside, left her phone on the counter, and crawled into bed not knowing what tomorrow would bring but certain it would be different than yesterday.