What We Left in Cairo

The papaya sat on the counter, already browning at the edges. Three days since you left, and the fruit you'd bought—so optimistic, so certain of our shared breakfasts—was quietly rotting. I threw it in the garbage without touching it.

Your hair still clogged the drain. Gray at the temples now, just like you'd always feared it would be. I remembered pulling it during our last fight, your hand over mine, not to stop me but to feel me. The intimacy of violence, the way love curdles into something sharper.

We went to Egypt last February. The Great Pyramid rose from the sand like some impossible geometric dream, and you said: 'Look at us, standing at the center of human ambition.' But I was thinking about the workers who died building it, the ones history forgot. That was always the difference between us—you saw glory in monuments; I saw the bodies buried beneath.

I went swimming this morning. The pool was empty at 6 AM, the water gray and unmoving. I floated on my back and imagined I was in the Nile, that I could let the current take me somewhere else entirely. Someplace where papayas don't rot and drains don't clog and love doesn't feel like grief in a nice outfit.

You were like a fox, you know. Clever and beautiful and impossible to tame. I spent seven years thinking I could build a home for something that needed to run. The last time we spoke, you said you'd never meant to hurt me. That was the cruelest part—you never meant anything. You just moved through my life the way foxes move through forests: leaving, arriving, leaving again, without apology.

The pyramids are still standing. I'm still swimming. The papaya is gone. You're gone. Somehow, impossibly, the world keeps turning.