The Salad Bowl Years

Elena stood at the sink, the cold water running over her hands as she washed the spinach leaves, watching them turn dark and glistening in the evening light. Behind her, Richard coughed — that dry, hollow sound that had become the soundtrack to their marriage these past three months.

"You don't have to keep doing this," he called from the living room, where he'd been camped out in his recliner since the surgery. "I can make myself something."

"I want to," she said, though she wasn't sure if that was still true.

The spinach clung to the colander like small green hands, like something holding on. She remembered when they'd first met, how Richard had hated vegetables, how she'd slowly won him over with elaborate salads that were really just love letters disguised as meals. Now those same salads were medicinal, prescribed by doctors, portioned out like obligation.

She reached for the vitamin bottle on the counter — the enormous one the doctor had insisted on, with pills the size of grapes. Richard swallowed them nightly without complaint, while she secretly resented how their evenings had become dominated by doses and timings, by the logistics of keeping him alive rather than the business of living together.

The water continued running, a steady stream she couldn't bring herself to turn off. In the silence of the kitchen, she realized she was washing the same leaf over and over, watching it spin in the current, going nowhere.

"Elena?" His voice was softer now. "Are you coming?"

She thought about saying something honest — that she was tired, that she was scared, that sometimes she missed when they were just two people who'd chosen each other, not a nurse and her patient. But instead she turned off the water, shaken by how easily she could have kept watching it flow, wasting time, wasting everything.

"Coming," she said, and carried the bowl of wet spinach into the living room, where the future waited to be eaten one careful bite at a time.