Riddles at the Breakfast Table

The papaya sat between us like a wedge of broken sunset, its seeds black as old regrets. Elena picked at the fruit with her fork, the metal scraping against ceramic in the kitchen that had once felt like ours, now just a room where we happened to exist simultaneously.

"I don't know what you want from me," I said, and my voice sounded thin, reedy. Not the voice of a man who'd once been confident he could build a life.

She looked up, and in her eyes I saw that same inscrutable quality—the sphinx's gaze that had drawn me to her three years ago in that dive bar in Chicago. She'd been reading philosophy then, surrounded by men buying her drinks she never touched. I'd been the one she'd let sit beside her, the one she'd allowed to solve the riddle of her smile, or so I'd believed. Maybe I'd just been the one who wouldn't leave.

Now baseball droned from the television in the living room, the announcer's voice floating in like smoke from a distant fire. Bottom of the ninth, two outs. The sport my father had loved, the one that had given us something to talk about in the hollow years after my mother left—those long Sunday afternoons where the game filled the silence between two men who didn't know how to say what needed saying.

"I want you to stop lying to yourself," Elena said finally. "That's all."

"Bullshit," I said, because it was easier than the truth. "What does that even mean?"

The word hung there, and I thought about how we'd spent months dancing around the obvious—how she'd stopped touching me, how I'd stopped asking why, how we both knew there was someone else. She'd met him at work. Some architect who designed glass houses, who probably didn't hide behind games he didn't watch and words he didn't mean. Who didn't need to.

"You're right," she said, standing up. "It is bullshit. All of it."

She left the papaya untouched, her half-eaten portion already browning where the fork had pierced it. The announcer cheered something—home run, I guessed, though I couldn't bring myself to care. I sat alone in the kitchen, and in the quiet that followed, I finally understood something my father probably learned too: some riddles aren't meant to be solved. They're meant to end.

Outside, the neighbor's dog barked at nothing. Somewhere, a thousand people cheered for men I'd never met. And I sat with a fruit that had traveled thousands of miles to die on my table, wondering if love was just another thing we imported to make ourselves feel less alone.