Riddles in Departures

The airport terminal's fluorescent lights hummed above Elena as she twisted a strand of her hair—still dark, still the same color it had been when David left her exactly three weeks ago. She'd considered chopping it all off, that dramatic post-breakup transformation everyone promised would feel liberating. Instead, she'd spent two hundred dollars on highlights that made her look like she'd been spending weekends at the beach instead of crying into Merlot.

Her iPhone buzzed against the hard plastic seat. David's name illuminated the screen: "Did you leave your sphinx figurine on the mantel?"

Elena stared at the message. The bronze sphinx they'd bought in Cairo during that last desperate attempt to save their marriage—the trip where they'd spent more time looking at their phones than each other, where David had declined to hold her hand because his palms were sweaty, and she'd pretended to understand, though she'd never minded his hands before. The sphinx had become a joke between them: the riddle they couldn't solve, the mystery they couldn't unlock, the silent guardian of their crumbling bedroom.

She typed and deleted three responses. Finally: "Keep it."

Her phone showed he was typing. Then nothing. Then: "It doesn't have eyes."

Elena remembered the moment she'd pointed it out at the souk, how the artisan had laughed and said, "The sphinx sees what cannot be seen." How romantic it had seemed then, how profound. Now it felt like a warning she should have heeded.

The gate agent announced boarding for her flight to San Francisco, where she'd start her new job on Monday. New city. New apartment. New life. Same hair, though she'd book that appointment soon enough. Same phone, same cracked screen from when she'd dropped it during their last fight—the one about nothing, the one that was really about everything.

She stood, adjusting her carry-on, and caught her reflection in the terminal window. Behind her own image, she could see the Manhattan skyline fading into dusk, becoming something hazy and inscrutable, like riddles whispered in the dark. Her phone buzzed one last time: "I don't know what I'm doing."

Neither did she. But the sphinx had never offered answers—only questions. Elena powered off her phone, stepped toward the gate, and for the first time in three years, walked forward without checking to see who was watching.