What We Leave Between Our Teeth

The papaya sat untouched between us, oxidizing in the restaurant's dim light, its orange flesh slowly browning like a bruise. Sarah hadn't touched her appetizer. She hadn't touched much of anything since she'd dropped the news two hours ago — not her wine, not my hand across the table, not even the carefully rehearsed speech I'd prepared for this exact moment, the one I'd been mentally editing for months.

'I didn't plan this,' she said, finally spearing a piece of fruit. 'I know that's what everyone says. But I didn't.'

Outside the window, palm trees swayed in the wind that always came up at dusk in this city. I watched their fronds scrape against the glass and thought about how many dinners we'd shared at this same table, how many Sunday mornings we'd said we needed to try somewhere new, how we never had. Routine had been the architecture of our marriage. I'd mistaken stability for love, or perhaps love for stability.

The waiter brought our entrées. My spinach salad glistened under the lights, dewy and deceptive. I watched Sarah pick at her food, and I realized she'd been picking at us for years — small removals, tiny erosions I'd chosen not to notice. The conversations she didn't start. The evenings she worked late. The way she'd started sleeping with her back to me.

'Your phone buzzed three times during the appetizer,' I said. 'Who texts you at 8 PM on a Tuesday?'

She didn't answer. She just put her palm flat against the white tablecloth, fingers splayed, and I noticed something I'd missed in all the years we'd been together: her hands were exactly like her mother's. Her mother, who'd left when Sarah was seven. Some patterns were geological. Some were inherited.

The papaya between us was fully brown now. I thought about how quickly things turned once you stopped paying attention. How sweetness rotted without care. How you could live with someone for seven years and still not know them at all.

'What do you want?' I asked.

She looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time all night. 'I want to stop pretending this is working. I want to stop eating the same papaya at the same restaurant and calling it a life. I want...' She stopped. 'I want to be alone. I think I've wanted that for a long time.'

Outside, the palms kept swaying, indifferent as trees always are. I nodded, finally understanding what she'd been telling me in all the silence between us. Some endings don't arrive suddenly. They've been happening for years, in small increments, in all the things we chose not to say.

I signaled for the check. The papaya sat between us, no longer edible. No longer anyone's.