Riddles in the Flood

The old baseball field had become a lake. Three days of rain will do that to a town built on limestone and wishful thinking. I stood at the edge of the former infield, watching the water ripple over home plate—where, exactly seven years ago, Marcus had dropped to one knee with a ring box hidden in his glove.

I'd said yes then. Now, sphinx-like, the question hovered between us: what do you do when love becomes a riddle with no satisfactory answer?

Lightning cracked the sky in half, illuminating the scoreboard where our names still flickered in ghostly traces of Sharpie. We'd carved them there after our first championship, thinking permanence was something you could etch into metal. Thinking promises were weatherproof.

Marcus wanted to stay in this town, coach little league, build a life measured in innings and seasons. I wanted out—wanted oceans, wanted to feel small beside something vast. The irony wasn't lost on me: here I was, back again, while he was probably somewhere dry and predictable, someone else's reliable shortstop.

My boots sank into the mud. I should have worn waders. Should have done a lot of things differently.

A movement in the water caught my eye—a catfish, sleek and ancient, breaking the surface before disappearing again. Swimming through what had once been left field. Nature reclaiming what we'd tried to tame. The water kept rising, inch by inch, swallowing the baselines, the pitcher's mound, the dugouts where we'd first kissed in the sudden summer storm of our twenties.

I remembered what Marcus had said that night: "Love isn't about solving each other. It's about becoming a mystery worth unraveling."

The sphinx had asked Oedipus what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in evening. The answer: man. But maybe the real riddle was how the same person could be everything to you, then nothing. How the person who knew your naked truths could become a stranger wearing a familiar face.

Another lightning strike, closer this time. The sky opened. I didn't move. Let the rain flatten my hair, let the water seep through my socks. Some griefs need to be weathered, not outrun.

The catfish surfaced again, unconcerned with human heartbreak. Just swimming, eating, surviving. Simple as that.

I turned back toward my car, toward the motel room with its hourly rates and worse coffee. Tomorrow I'd leave this town again. But tonight, in this drowned cathedral of failed dreams and damp nostalgia, I allowed myself the luxury of missing him. The sphinx remains silent on whether that makes me weak or human.

Probably both.