Cable and Current

The server room hummed around me, a graveyard of forgotten connections. I'd been here since midnight, untangling the cable nightmare that someone – probably three admins ago – had left behind. My fingers were raw, my eyes burned from fluorescent light, but I couldn't leave until the network was live. Again.

Mia's sphinx tattoo had stared back at me last night, that half-woman, half-lion creature wrapped around her shoulder with enigmatic eyes. She'd gotten it after her mother died, something about riddles and unanswered questions. I'd always found it unsettling – the way the creature seemed to know secrets it wouldn't share, much like Mia herself in the final months.

"You're always swimming upstream, David," she'd said during our last conversation, her voice hollowed out by disappointment. "Some fights aren't worth drowning for."

I'd thought she meant the job. The endless server migrations. The nights she fell asleep to the blue light of my laptop screen. But she'd meant us – the slow erosion of intimacy, the way I'd mistaken presence for connection.

The cable in my hand snapped. A clean break. I stared at it, realizing I'd been pulling too hard, trying to force something that no longer fit. Just like I'd tried to force conversations, force intimacy, force Mia to be someone she wasn't – someone who needed me the way I needed her.

The server room's cold air seeped through my shirt. I remembered swimming with Mia in Lake Michigan last autumn, how we'd tread water beyond the pier, suspended between sky and depths, both terrified and exhilarated by the darkness below. She'd looked at me then with something like hope, and I'd looked past her at the shore, already mentally cataloging tomorrow's tasks.

The sphinx's riddle wasn't about the creature at all. It was about recognizing when you're the one who refuses to see the answer.

I dropped the broken cable and walked out of the server room, leaving the network dead. Mia wasn't waiting for me to fix anything anymore. Some riddles resolve themselves when you finally stop wrestling with the wrong question.