The Small We Leave Behind

The papaya sat on the counter, its skin freckled with brown spots, waiting like a judgment I'd been avoiding. Three days past ripe, exactly the length of time since Lucas moved out.

I sliced it anyway. The flesh was too soft, bordering on fermented—sweet in that cloying way that makes your teeth ache. We'd bought it together on Sunday, standing in the produce aisle with that domestic optimism of people who think grocery shopping is a foundation for forever. The papaya had been his idea. "Exotic," he'd called it, as if we were explorers and not just two people building a life on credit card points and sharedNetflix passwords.

I carried the bowl to the balcony door. The goldfish, Cardinal—because Lucas had found him abandoned in a parking lot near a Catholic school—swam in frantic circles whenever I approached. His bowl sat on the small table between our two chairs, the ones we'd bought at IKEA in a fever of new-together efficiency, the boxes assembled with arguments and cheap wine.

"You're hungry, aren't you?" I whispered to the fish, sprinkling flakes that scattered like confetti on a parade nobody attended anymore. Cardinal surfaced, mouth opening and closing in that eternal O of surprise, as if he couldn't believe I'd let it go this long either.

Inside, wilted spinach waited in the crisper drawer. Another testament to my neglect, to how thoroughly I'd been capable of disappearing when things fell apart. I'd meant to make salads for dinner, those healthy meals we promised each other we'd start eating once we turned thirty, once we were real adults with real priorities. Now the spinach was blackening at the edges, its leaves curling like dying flowers pressed in a book nobody would open.

I threw it all—the papaya, the spinach—into the trash bag that already held Lucas's toothbrush holder and the frame that used to hold our picture from that trip to New Orleans. The frame had shattered when he knocked it off the shelf while packing, and I'd swept up the glass but left the backing board, that little stand that had held us upright for three years.

Cardinal swam to the front of his bowl, pressing his orange mouth against the glass. I watched him for a long time, thinking about contained spaces and the things we outgrow, the ways we keep swimming even when the water's gone stale and still.

"Me too," I said to the fish. "But at least I'm feeding you now."

That was something. That was the start, anyway.