The Last Riddle

You've been running for forty-five minutes when your phone buzzes. Sarah's sister. Again. You don't answer. Your breath clouds the December air as your sneakers slap the pavement—rhythm, repetition, the only thing that makes sense anymore.

The goldfish bowl sits on your kitchen counter at home, its single orange companion circling the same small space, over and over. Sarah bought it three months before the accident, during that brief phase where she decided she needed more color in her life. More life. The irony isn't lost on you.

You stop at a park bench, bent double, hands on knees. Your therapist says grief isn't linear. She says you should feel whatever comes up. But what comes up mostly is irritation—that you're still here, still running circles like that stupid fish, while Sarah is...

Gone. Not dead. Just gone.

The dementia came first—early-onset, aggressive, cruel. Then the stroke. Then the facility where she sometimes knows you and sometimes looks at you with the blank-eyed stare of a stranger asking a riddle you'll never solve.

You remember lying in bed with her before everything fell apart, how she'd trace the lines on your palm and say, "You know what the sphinx asked Oedipus? What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?"

"A human," you'd say.

"No," she'd smile, her dark eyes crinkling. "It's love. It starts fragile, grows strong, then ends up needing support again."

You thought she was being poetic. You didn't know she was predicting her own future.

The goldfish has outlived her usefulness to Sarah, but you keep her alive because you can't let go. You run because you can't catch up. And somewhere in a facility twenty miles away, a woman who used to be your wife watches her own hands move and doesn't recognize them as hers.

You start running again. The riddle isn't what walks on four legs then two then three. The riddle is how to keep loving someone who's already left, how to live in the space between memory and forgetting, how to breathe when breathing feels like betrayal.

The sphinx never said what happens after the three-legged part. Maybe because even myths can't bear to face the end.