Riddles in the Pharmacy Aisle

Maya stood in the supplement aisle, staring at the wall of vitamin D3 bottles like they held answers she couldn't articulate. Her phone buzzed in her pocket — Marcus again. She'd stopped looking at his messages three days ago, when she'd realized that every notification was just another riddle she didn't want to solve.

They'd been together eight months, and Marcus remained a sphinx to her. Beautiful, distant, his thoughts arranged behind eyes that gave away nothing. She'd found herself playing detective, piecing together his moods from the smallest clues: the way he positioned his coffee cup, the particular silence that meant he'd had a bad day at the firm. It was exhausting, this constant translation work.

Her iphone lit up with a call. His name on the screen made her chest tighten. Something had shifted between them recently — or maybe something had finally broken through her careful denial. Last week, she'd watched him scroll through dinner while she talked about her mother's surgery, his face illuminated by that familiar blue glow, entirely elsewhere.

"I need to tell you something," he'd said later, in bed, his back to her.

She'd waited. The silence stretched so long she thought she might scream.

"I don't know what I want," he'd finished, which was no answer at all.

Now, in the fluorescent brightness of the pharmacy, she selected a bottle of B-complex and joined the checkout line. The clerk scanned her items with practiced disinterest. Another customer behind her sighed impatiently.

Maya's phone buzzed again. She pulled it out, read Marcus's text: *Can we talk?*

She thought about riddles and answers, about the vitamins that promised to fix what was missing. About how some people remained unknowable no matter how hard you tried to solve them. About how maybe that wasn't failure — maybe it was just the shape of certain things.

Outside, the evening sky had that particular purple quality of autumn. She typed back: *No. I think I'm done guessing.*

Then she blocked his number, dropped her phone in her bag, and walked toward the metro, feeling lighter than she had in months. Some riddles, she decided, weren't meant to be solved. They were meant to be walked away from.