What We Carry Inside

The vitamin sat on her tongue, bitter and small, a daily ritual of hope that had curdled into habit. For three years, Elena had swallowed these pills with religious devotion—prenatal vitamins for a pregnancy that never arrived, for a child she and Marcus stopped trying for eight months ago. Yet still she took them, a prayer without a believer.

The papaya rotted on the counter. Marcus had bought it on a whim, nostalgic for the Hawaiian honeymoon they couldn't afford to recreate. Now its flesh was soft and bruised, orange-brown in spots, smelling faintly of decay. Like them, really—once something sweet and exotic, now just something left out too long.

They'd fought again last night. The same circular argument, worn smooth like river stones. She wanted to try again. He wanted to accept what was. Neither willing to say the word that had become a bear in the room, massive and hibernating, dangerous when disturbed: divorce.

Elena cut into the papaya. The flesh wept juice. She ate a piece, sweet and cloying, forcing herself to taste it. The cable box blinked in the living room, a blue light in the darkness. Marcus had fallen asleep to sports highlights again, the low murmur of commentators his lullaby. She'd stopped watching television with him months ago—the flickering light made her think of all the hours they'd spent side by side, barely touching, hypnotized by screens while their life slipped away.

She looked at her hands. The skin was beginning to thin, sun damage appearing like rust on metal. She was thirty-eight. Her mother had had her at forty-one, late and unexpected, a gift she'd never stop talking about. Elena was becoming that age where she had to decide what kind of woman she'd be: the one who made peace with empty rooms, or the one who burned it all down and started over.

The bear of it—really the bear—was that she didn't know if she wanted a child anymore. She wanted what the child represented: proof that they'd made something real together, evidence that their marriage had produced more than just debt and disappointment. She wanted to be seen, to be necessary to someone who didn't take her for granted.

Marcus's phone chimed on the nightstand. 2 AM. A work notification that couldn't wait until morning. He didn't stir. Elena felt something crack open inside her, clean and sharp as broken glass.

She packed a bag. Just the essentials. She left the vitamins on the counter, a neat row of promises she was finally breaking. She left the half-eaten papaya, its perfume thick in the air. She left the sleeping man who had taught her that loneliness could exist even in the same bed.

The orange glow of streetlights followed her to her car. She didn't know where she was going. Only that for the first time in twelve years, she was going alone.