What We Feed
The papaya sat on the counter between us, ripe and Splitting like a wound that wouldn't heal. Julian was cutting it with clinical precision, the knife flashing in the kitchen's harsh fluorescence.
'We should talk about the padel club membership,' he said, not looking at me. 'It's up for renewal.' He'd been using the present tense a lot lately, as if still paying for things together could make us still together.
'I'll pay you my half,' I said. My voice sounded flat, like I was reading from a script I'd memorized months ago.
'That's not what Iā' He stopped himself, dropped papaya seeds into the compost bin with a wet thud.
I watched him, this man who'd once surprised me with a tank of goldfish on our third anniversary because he remembered I'd loved them as a child. Three fish, one tank. They'd all died within six months. We'd cried over the last one, curled together on the bathroom floor, and I'd thought: this is someone who knows how to grieve with me. Now I wondered if we'd just been practicing.
The spinach was wilting in the colander. I began tearing at the leaves, harder than necessary. 'Are you seeing her?'
Julian's knife stilled. 'Does it matter?'
'It matters if you lie about it.'
'I'm not lying.' He looked at me then, and I saw what I'd been refusing to see for months: he wasn't leaving me for someone else. He was leaving because the space between us had grown too large to cross, and neither of us remembered how to build bridges anymore. We'd become roommates who shared a bed and a padel schedule, going through motions that had lost their meaning somewhere between the goldfish and the silence.
'The membership,' I said. 'Cancel it.'
He nodded once, something like relief in his eyes. 'Yeah. Okay.'
We ate the papaya standing up, juice dripping onto our hands, sweet and strange and final. Outside, something was blooming. Inside, something else had already died. The goldfish had known it first, swimming in circles, forgetting everything every seven seconds, learning nothing, returning again and again to the same glass walls. We'd taken longer. That was the only difference.