The Weight of Sweet Things

I stand in the industrial kitchen at 6 AM, dicing papaya for a corporate wellness retreat I can barely bring myself to care about. The fruit's vibrant orange flesh seems too alive somehow—too bright for a Tuesday that feels like every other Tuesday since Mark died. Three years of widowhood have turned me into something like a zombie, moving through the motions of life while feeling hollowed out by grief. I show up to work at this upscale catering company because mortgages don't care about dead husbands, and somewhere along the way, I've learned that bearing the weight of absence is just another form of labor.

The executive assistant, maybe twenty-two with skin that still glows, hovers nearby. "Did you try the spinach salad?" she asks, arranging baby leaves with the reverence most people reserve for holy texts. "I read this article about superfoods. Papaya, spinach, berries—said if you eat enough of them, you'll never get sick. Never die, almost."

The comment catches me. Mark had a bear tattoo on his chest—black ink on pale skin, claws raised in permanent roar. He'd gotten it at eighteen, drunk on bravado and cheap tequila, convinced it made him indestructible. That bear didn't protect him. Neither did the spinach we started buying because his doctor mentioned antioxidants, nor the expensive blender we purchased for "health smoothies" that now gathers dust beside the rotting papaya on our kitchen counter.

"Sarah?" Her voice pulls me back. "You okay?"

I look at the girl, so certain that the right foods, the right choices, can armor us against mortality. I want to tell her about the bears we all carry, the way we're all just pretending not to be zombies navigating a world that keeps taking what we love. Instead I slide the cutting board toward her, watching her arrange fruit with the confidence of someone who hasn't yet learned that some things can't be prevented or prepared away.

"Fine," I say. "Just thinking about how we all think we can live forever."

She laughs, not understanding, and returns to her spinach arrangement. I pick up another papaya, impossibly sweet and temporary, and bear down on the knife, making myself present for whatever comes next.