Cable to the Sphinx

The frayed cable had been dangling from the wall for six months—since Maya left, since she took her cable subscription and her warmth and her ability to make silence feel companionable rather than accusatory. Now I watched static dance across the screen where baseball games used to play, our Sunday ritual reduced to gray noise.

Outside, the dog scratched at the door. Bear, a rescue with anxiety issues, could sense my moods with terrifying precision. I'd named him after the constellation, Ursa Major, but Maya used to joke he lived up to the other kind—bearing the weight of our collective neuroses on his scruffy shoulders.

"Bear, settle," I said, but my voice cracked.

He whined and abandoned the door to rest his heavy head on my knee. The therapist said I should get out more. Reconnect. Live again. But living felt like walking through a room where someone had just removed the furniture—all the spaces where things used to be, phantom impressions in the dust.

I found myself at the museum at noon on a Tuesday, standing before the sphinx. The granite creature's worn face stared past me, its riddle supposedly eroded by three thousand years of wind and time. But looking at its blank eyes, I wondered if the riddle wasn't gone—just transformed. Perhaps the question had shifted from "What walks on four legs then two then four?" to something more pedestrian: How do you bear the weight of days that refuse to become years?

The baseball stadium loomed beyond the skylight, empty on a weekday. I remembered Maya's laugh when I'd explained the infield fly rule, how she'd called me adorable and kissed me like she meant it. The memory hit with such force that I had to sit on the bench, right there beside the sphinx's giant paw.

"It's okay," a woman's voice said.

I looked up. A stranger with kind eyes and a golden retriever sat nearby. She wasn't looking at me, exactly, but at her dog, who was investigating the sphinx's base with gentle curiosity.

"They leave holes," she said, still not meeting my eyes. "The people who go. You don't fill them. You just grow around them."

The dog—Bear's doppelganger—wagged his tail and offered me a stick. I took it. Outside, the sun had broken through the clouds. The cable at home still dangled from the wall. The static still waited. But for the first time in months, I thought I might be ready to turn it off.