What We Left Behind

The papaya sat untouched on the bedside table, its flesh already softening in the tropical heat. Three days ago, David had sliced it open for breakfast, his hands sure and gentle, the way they'd once been with me. Now the fruit was gathering fruit flies, a small rotting monument to the honeymoon we'd never finished.

I stood at the edge of the infinity pool, the water blurring into the ocean beyond. Somewhere on the other side of the resort, a woman in a wide-brimmed hat laughed—too loud, too bright, like she was mocking my inability to do anything but stare at water and wait for feelings that refused to arrive.

'You don't have to bear this alone,' my sister had said on the phone this morning, her voice thick with the pity I couldn't stomach. She meant well. They all did. The invitations to stay with friends, the check-in texts, the gentle suggestions that maybe I should come home early from what was now officially a vacation for one.

But the truth was, I wasn't bearing anything at all. That was the problem. David had walked out of our marriage two weeks before the wedding, and I'd simply... ceased to feel. Not numbness, exactly. More like a hollowed-out space where something monumental should be but wasn't.

I reached for my discarded sun hat—a cream-colored thing with a silk ribbon I'd bought specially for this trip—and pulled it low over my eyes. The brim cut the world down to a manageable slice of concrete and water and endless, indifferent blue.

A pool boy passed by, his cart clinking with empty glasses. 'Another drink, ma'am?'

'No,' I said. 'No more.' And for the first time since David had packed his things in the middle of the night, leaving only a note and half a closet of clothes he wouldn't need, something broke through. Not grief. Not rage. Something simpler.

I took the papaya to the balcony and dropped it over the edge. It hit the pavement far below with a wet, satisfying sound. Tomorrow I would check out. Tomorrow I would call my mother. Tomorrow I would figure out what came after this.

But tonight, I ordered another drink, and watched the stars come out over the ocean, and let myself be exactly, brutally nothing at all.