Bearing the Weight

The vitamins sat in his palm like communion wafers—a daily ritual of faith in a body that felt increasingly foreign. David swallowed them without water, staring at the cat sleeping on the windowsill, her gray flank rising and falling with an indifference he envied.

She hadn't always been his cat. Six months ago, when Sarah moved out, she'd said, "I can't take her. You two understand each other."

Understanding. That was the joke.

The office was a tomb of fluorescent light and polite brutality. His colleagues moved like zombies—pale, shuffling, undead in everything but biology. They spoke of synergies and deliverables with hollow eyes, their souls already departed for somewhere warmer. David felt himself joining them, piece by piece, his humanity eroding under the relentless tide of meaningless metrics.

Then came the morning he found the sphinx.

It stood in the garden of the old Victorian house down the street—a concrete statue, weathered and moss-covered, its face eroded into something almost human. Something that looked like it had seen everything and forgotten nothing.

He started walking past it every morning. Stopping. Looking into those sightless eyes.

"What's the riddle?" he'd whisper, cold air pluming from his lips. The sphinx never answered, but its silence felt like an invitation. Like it was waiting for him to bear witness to something he'd been avoiding.

The breakdown came on a Tuesday. He stood in his kitchen, vitamins scattered across the floor like aborted prayers, the cat winding around his ankles, and finally, finally, let himself scream. About Sarah. About the zombie existence he'd been living. About the riddle he couldn't solve.

The cat purred into his silence, steady and demanding.

He cleaned up the vitamins. Fed the cat. Went to work and quit at noon.

Now he sits in his garden, coffee in hand, watching the morning light catch the sphinx's weathered face. He still takes the vitamins—some rituals are worth keeping—but differently now. Not as penance or hope, but as acknowledgment of the machine he inhabits, the bear he's learned to dance with.

The cat jumps onto his lap. He scratches behind her ears.

"You know," he tells her, "the riddle wasn't about answers."

She blinks, slowly, and settles into his warmth like she's always known.