The Seventh Inning Stretch

The baseball game played mutely on the television above the bar, a distraction neither of us needed. Marcus swirled the ice in his glass, the orange slice garnish floating like a tiny life raft. He hadn't looked at me since I mentioned the divorce papers sitting on the kitchen counter.

"You're leaving me over spinach?" he'd asked, incredulous, when I first tried explaining. It wasn't about the spinach—those green leaves wilting in the crisper drawer, forgotten like so many promises between us. But how do you explain the weight of twelve years slowly suffocating you?

I ordered another drink, watching the bartender's hands move with practiced efficiency. Marcus and I had met at a baseball game, seventh inning stretch, both reaching for the same dropped pretzel. We'd laughed about the serendipity of it all, the way fate sometimes intervened.

Now fate felt less like serendipity and more like a slow accumulation of disappointments. The forgotten anniversary. The contempt in his voice when I got promoted. The way he'd started sleeping in the guest room "because of his snoring," though I never heard him snore.

"I'm not leaving you over spinach," I said now, my voice steady despite the hollow ache in my chest. "I'm leaving because I can't remember the last time you looked at me like I mattered."

The orange sunset burned through the bar's windows, painting everything in hues of goodbye. On screen, the batter struck out, and the small crowd watching groaned in unison. Some things ended with fanfare. Others just

faded away like forgotten vegetables in the back of the refrigerator.

Marcus finally met my eyes. For a moment, I saw the man I'd fallen in love with—confused, hurt, but still there somewhere beneath all the accumulated years of disappointment. Then he turned back to his drink, and the moment passed.

"Check, please," I told the bartender.

Outside, the autumn air smelled of possibility. I walked away from the bar, from Marcus, from the life that no longer fit me like it once had. Somewhere in the distance, church bells rang. A new inning was beginning.