Everything We Never Said

The sphinx had been watching us for three years. David bought it in Cairo—some half-serious attempt to seem cultured, I'd thought then—though now the ceramic creature seemed less like kitsch and more like accusation. Its painted eyes followed me around the apartment, asking the same riddle in silence: what happens when you realize you married someone you don't know?

We sat on opposite ends of the sofa, his thigh touching mine with that terrible domestic familiarity of two people who've run out of words. The TV cable lay severed between us, David's frustrated project from the weekend, exposed copper like a failed nervous system trying to signal something—anything—between us.

"I can't do this anymore," I said. The words felt foreign, like they'd been waiting behind my teeth for years.

"Do what?" He didn't look up from his phone, screen reflecting blue across his face.

"This. Whatever this is."

The goldfish bowl on the windowsill caught the last light. We'd won it at a carnival—the kind of impulsive, optimistic purchase people make when they still believe in forever. Now it swam alone in its glass universe, opening and closing its mouth in silent repetition. I wondered if it remembered the other fish, the ones who'd died in the careless weeks after our honeymoon, when we were too busy being happy to notice anything dying.

David set down his phone. Finally, he looked at me. "Is this about last night?"

"It's about every night." I reached for his hand, something I hadn't done in months. He flinched but didn't pull away. "When's the last time you really looked at me? When's the last time we said something true?"

He turned his hand over and pressed his palm against mine. The lifeline there had seemed so promising the night we met, when that overpriced fortune teller at his sister's wedding had traced both our hands and whispered, "This one's forever." I'd wanted to believe it so badly I'd made myself forget that fortune tellers are just unemployed actors with a gift for telling people what they're desperate to hear.

"I thought we were happy," David said. His voice cracked—honest, finally.

"I know," I said. "That's the riddle, isn't it?"

Outside, the city hummed with the lives of people who were either happy or about to discover they weren't. The sphinx kept its secret. The goldfish opened its mouth one more time before the light failed completely. Some things, I realized, remain riddles because the answer is too terrifying to speak aloud: that sometimes love is just another word for the time it takes to notice you've been swimming alone all along.