Riddles in the Empty Room

The sphinx of kitchen appliances — that sleek, white refrigerator — hummed its eternal question: what sustains us when we've already lost everything? I stared at its open door, the cold light illuminating containers of takeout curry that had fossilized since she left.

"You need to take your vitamins," Sarah had said, pressing the orange bottle into my palm two mornings before the breakup. "You're thirty-five now. Things catch up." Her hair had smelled of coconut conditioner and the inevitable. Now the vitamins sat on the counter like witness testimony to my failure at self-care.

Barnaby, her cat — now my cat, apparently — wound through my legs, his orange fur dusting my black work pants. He purred with the enthusiasm of someone who hadn't had his heart ripped out three weeks ago. I'd never even liked cats. Sarah had found him as a kitten behind a dumpster, mewing like some tiny, abandoned philosophy. "He needs us," she'd said. That was her language. Need.

My iPhone buzzed on the counter. Sarah's name illuminated the screen. The third time this week. I stared at it like it was an unexploded device, my heart doing that complicated gymnastics routine — hope crashing into resolve smashing into something like nausea.

"Your hair's getting thin," my mother had observed over Thanksgiving, deploying her favorite weapon: casual cruelty delivered between bites of pumpkin pie. "Stress ages you." She'd probably approve of Sarah's departure. Better to be thin-haired and single than stuck with someone who might, at any moment, decide you weren't enough.

The sphinx hummed. I swallowed a vitamin dry. Barnaby meowed, demanding, demanding. The iPhone went dark, then brightened again with a missed call notification.

Some riddles don't have answers. Some questions are just questions.

I picked up the phone. Called back.

"Your vitamins," she said. "Did you take them?"

"Every day."

"Good." A pause. "That's good."

We breathed into the silence together, two people who'd forgotten how to be strangers but couldn't remember how to be anything else.