The Last Tourist

The pyramid outside our window held more secrets than my marriage ever had.

"It's all relative," Elena said, pushing spinach around her plate with the kind of deliberate indifference she'd perfected over twenty years. "The angles, the proportions. Ancient aliens, my ass."

We were at the Mena House, killing time before our separate flights home. This was it—the dissolution tour. Package deal, all-inclusive resentment.

I watched her swim in the pool earlier that morning, doing laps with mechanical precision, back and forth like she was trying to outpace something. The sphinx of Giza watched from the distance, stone lips sealed, knowing better than anyone how silence could eat you alive.

"Remember when we thought we'd be different?" I asked.

She laughed, but her eyes stayed on the buffet line. "We were thirty and stupid. Now we're fifty and merely tired."

I'd bought her a small soapstone sphinx at the gift shop yesterday—a joke about her being impossible to read. She'd left it on the nightstand, wrapped, untouched.

Outside, workers in dusty uniforms trimmed the palm trees with machetes, the fronds falling like failed ambitions. Tourists snapped photos, desperate to prove they'd been somewhere, seen something.

Elena's phone buzzed. She didn't check it.

"I meant what I said in the cab," I said. "About trying counseling."

"Some things don't fix. They just are." She finally ate a forkful of spinach, chewed slowly. "We had our run. It was good mostly, and that's more than most people get."

The pyramid cast its long shadow across our table, deepening by the minute. Somewhere in that pile of limestone, pharaohs slept wrapped in linen and gold, their secrets intact. Meanwhile, we sat here with nothing left to hide and no way to say it.

"Order matters," she said, wiping her mouth. "In pyramids, in arguments. In life." She stood up, smoothing her dress. "My cab's in ten minutes."

I watched her walk away, her silhouette against the Egyptian sun, and wondered if I'd ever stop swimming toward someone who'd already reached the other shore.