The Produce Aisle as Modern Romance

Fresh Crisp Crunchy

Provigo at dinner time is where loneliness goes to shop. We're all here squeezing avocados like they hold answers, pretending we know what ripe means. You're in front of the tomatoes, looking lost.

"The good ones are gone," you say to no one, maybe to me.

"Story of my life," I answer, and you turn, surprised I responded.

We shop together without acknowledging it; parallel movement through aisles, accidentally synchronized. You buy ingredients for one. So do I. The arithmetic of solitude.

At the wine section, we converge again. You're holding a bottle of Malbec. "For cooking," you lie.

"Yeah," I lie back.

The checkout line is long, giving us time to pretend we're not aware of each other's baskets: your frozen dinners, my bag of oranges I'll let rot, both our bottles of cooking wine. The teenage cashier asks if we're together. We both say no too quickly.

Outside, it's raining. We stand under the overhang, bags at our feet, waiting for something; the rain to stop, courage to arrive, the world to make sense.

"Want to cook together?" you finally ask. "I mean, since we both have wine for cooking."

We both know how this ends: morning light, awkward coffee, promises to call we won't keep. But tonight, we carry our groceries into the rain, toward your apartment or mine, toward the temporary shelter of shared meals and lies about cooking wine.