Riddle of the Half-Alive

Maya sat across from Marcus at the bistro, the candlelight casting shadows that made his face seem unfamiliar—like a **sphinx** guarding secrets she'd spent seven years trying to decipher. He was talking about his promotion, something about scalability and synergies, but Maya's mind had drifted to how **running** together every morning had stopped being something they did and started being something she did alone while he slept.

"You're not listening," Marcus said, not accusingly. Just tiredly. Like he'd stopped expecting her to show up months ago.

"I'm listening." She smoothed the white tablecloth. "You're happy. That's good."

The waiter set down her salad. **Spinach** leaves glistened with vinaigrette, impossibly green against the muted beige of everything between them. She picked at it, suddenly eleven years old again, standing in her mother's kitchen while her mother pressed a damp cloth to her father's forehead—the migraine that always came after he'd worked sixty hours straight. *'This is what love looks like,'* her mother had said, and Maya had believed her until three weeks ago, when she'd found herself standing in their bathroom at 3 AM, watching herself in the mirror and realizing she'd become something else entirely.

"You look like a **zombie**," Marcus had told her that morning, not unkindly, as if observing a weather pattern.

"I feel like one," she'd replied, and meant it. Not the flesh-eating kind. The sadder kind—the kind that keeps going through motions because someone forgot to bury it properly.

Now, Marcus reached across the table and took her hand. His thumb rubbed over her knuckle, gentle and automatic. "Maya. What's happening?"

She looked at their joined hands, then at the **orange** sunset painting the restaurant windows in impossible gold. Tomorrow would be their anniversary. She'd bought him a watch. He'd probably forgotten, or remembered in that frantic last-minute way that had become his default.

"I don't want to be half-alive anymore," she heard herself say. The room went very quiet, though she didn't think she'd spoken loudly. "I don't want us to be."

Marcus's thumb stilled. The sphinx across from her finally seemed to have an answer, or maybe the question had changed. Outside, the last light burned itself into the horizon, and Maya realized—with sudden, terrible clarity—that she was about to become the kind of person who broke things. That some riddles, once solved, couldn't be unanswered. That the spinach on her plate would still be there when she was done, patient and dark, waiting to show her what her own hungry reflection already knew.