What Remains

The papaya sat on the counter for three days after she left, its skin turning from green to mottled yellow, a quiet betrayal of time passing. I hadn't bought it. She had, with that particular optimism she'd brought to everything—grocery shopping, our marriage, the belief that if you just planned well enough, things would work out.

My iPhone buzzed on the nightstand at 3 AM, the screen lighting up the dark room with her name. I stared at it like it was a live wire, my thumb hovering over the decline button. We'd been separated for two weeks, and she still called in the middle of the night sometimes, drunk or lonely or both. I let it ring until it stopped, then watched the voicemail notification appear and slowly fade.

The orange streetlamp outside our window—that was our window, now just mine—cast everything in a sickly sepia. Her cat, Bast, whom I'd insisted we keep because she couldn't take him to her sister's apartment, jumped onto the bed and headbutted my chin. He'd been sleeping in her spot on the bed every night since she left, as if his body heat could somehow fill the shape of her absence.

"You're confusing," I told him, scratching behind his ears. "You miss her, but you're stuck here with me."

He purred anyway, because cats are practical that way.

The next morning, I cut into the papaya. It was finally soft enough, its center filled with shiny black seeds like something prehistoric. I ate it standing at the counter, the juice running down my wrist, sweet and faintly musky—exactly the way she'd hated it. She'd only liked it when it was still firm, barely ripe. I'd never understood how anyone could eat fruit that hadn't fully committed to being itself yet.

My iPhone chimed again. A text this time: "I think I left my favorite sweater. Can we talk?"

I looked at the papaya seeds in my hand, slippery and black as secrets. Then I typed back: "I'll leave it in the lobby. Your sister can pick it up."

The cat watched from the counter, his tail flicking with judgment. Outside, the orange light of morning was already beginning to bleach away the streetlamp's glow. Some things, I realized, you had to let rot before you could taste them properly.