Water and Waking

Maya stood at the kitchen sink watching **water** cascade over her hands, feeling the rhythm of something like desire return to her body after three years of corporate hibernation. Her phone buzzed on the counter — Greg, probably canceling dinner again. The office had turned her into something unrecognizable, a **zombie** in Prada heels, moving through quarterly reports and Zoom calls without really inhabiting her own life.

She sliced into the **papaya** she'd bought on impulse, its sunset flesh bleeding onto the cutting board. The scent hit her — tropical, uncomplicated, alive — and she remembered the woman she'd been before the promotion that was supposed to fix everything. The woman who painted, who took trips alone, who didn't measure her worth in performance reviews.

Greg found her like that later, standing in the open refrigerator, eating **spinach** leaves with her fingers. The blue light from his phone illuminated his exhausted face as he leaned against the doorframe.

"You okay?" he asked, the same question he'd asked every night for six months.

Maya swallowed the bitterness, the crunch, the life of it. "I don't want to be this person anymore," she said, and the words came out like water breaking through a dam.

Greg set down his phone. For the first time in ages, he really looked at her. "Then who do you want to be?"

She took his hand, her fingers still cold from the refrigerator. "Someone who remembers what food tastes like. Someone who's actually here."

Outside, rain began to fall, and somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled like the earth itself was waking up.