The Weight of Leaving

Sarah stood in the produce aisle, fluorescent lights humming above her like trapped insects. She'd been **running** for three months now—from the grief, from the empty apartment, from the photos that still lined the hallway like accusations. Her therapist called it avoidance. Sarah called it survival.

The **papaya** in her hand felt alien, exotic in this stark suburban grocery store. David had loved them. Would cut them open with surgical precision, the seeds scattered like black pearls on a plate. That was before. Before the diagnosis. Before the conversations that circled the drain of hope and emerged as something harder.

She couldn't **bear** another night of wine and silence. The condo agreement paperwork sat on her kitchen counter, a testament to thirty years dissolved into attorney fees and awkward dinners with friends who didn't know what to say.

Outside, a stray **cat** watched her through the glass doors, its coat matted with rain and indifference. David would have brought it home. Would have named it something ridiculous and spent hours coaxing it inside with treats and soft words. Sarah just watched it watch her, understanding perfectly the desire to remain untouched, to belong nowhere and to no one.

She put the papaya back. Some things you couldn't carry forward.

The automatic doors slid open. The cat darted into the parking lot, a streak of survival against the asphalt. Sarah walked to her car, keys jingling like a promise she wasn't ready to make. Tomorrow she'd sign the papers. Tomorrow she'd stop running.

For tonight, she drove home under streetlights that blurred into stars, alone and alive and terrified of both.