The Architecture of Loss

The Giza plateau spread before us—three ancient triangles against a bruised purple sky. The Great Pyramid loomed like some impossible geological accident, a monument to dead kings and their desperate grasp at eternity.

"You're not really my friend anymore, are you?" Elena said. She didn't look at me. She was tracing lines in her palm, those ridiculous fortune-teller tricks she'd picked up in Marrakesh. "Life line's fractured," she'd whispered earlier. "Makes sense."

We were sitting on the terrace of the hotel restaurant, nursing warm gin and tonics. Below, the tourist buses were finally leaving, their diesel exhaust hanging in the still desert air like ghosts.

I looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time in years. We'd been friends since college, through bad haircuts and worse boyfriends, through her mother's death and my divorce. But somewhere between the corporate ladder climbing and the mortgage payments, we'd become something else: two people who knew each other's history but had lost the plot of each other's lives.

"I'm still your friend," I said, and it sounded like a lie even to me.

"Remember when we made that spinach salad at your place in Chicago?" she asked, suddenly. "The one with the too much garlic? We ate the whole bowl standing in your kitchen, talking until 4 AM about how we'd change the world."

I remembered. We'd been so earnest then, so certain that the pyramid scheme of adulthood—work harder, achieve more, consume better—was something we could opt out of. We couldn't.

"The pyramid's just a pile of rocks," she said, gesturing toward the ancient silhouette in the distance. "That's all any of it is. Just rocks stacked on rocks until they look like something important."

She opened her hand, palm up, like she was waiting for something to fall into it. "I'm leaving David," she said finally. "I'm leaving everything. I want to go back to who I was before I started climbing."

The waiter brought our check. Under the flickering terrace lights, her face was beautiful and terrible in its certainty.

"Come with me," she said.

I looked at the pyramid, at the impossible weight of everything I'd built, at the woman who was somehow still the person I'd eaten garlic spinach with in a drafty apartment a lifetime ago. I opened my palm and looked at the lines there, the ones that said I was supposed to keep climbing.

"Okay," I said.

Somewhere in the desert, a call to prayer began—a sound like the earth itself was singing.

We didn't look back at the pyramid. We didn't need to.