The Longest Cable

The coaxial cable lay coiled like a sleeping snake across the apartment floor, its connector end staring up at me with the blank eye of a sphinx—inscrutable, ancient in its plastic modernity. I hadn't seen Sarah in three years, not since the funeral where we'd both stood numb beneath the palm trees that seemed wrong for the climate, wrong for the occasion.

"You came," she said, not a question.

"You asked."

Her dog—a rescue with anxious eyes and the jittery energy of something that had known cruelty—pressed its wet nose against my hand. I knelt, scratching behind its ears. At least something here still wanted me close.

Sarah moved through her living room like a ghost haunting her own life. She looked older than thirty-two, hollowed out by something she wouldn't name. The years between us stretched tight, pulled thin. We used to finish each other's sentences. Now we couldn't even start conversations.

"The internet's been out since Tuesday," she said, gesturing vaguely at the cable dangling from the wall. "I keep meaning to call, but then I think—what's the point? Who am I even reaching for anymore?"

The question hung between us, a riddle without an answer. I realized then that we had become friends out of habit rather than hunger, that the person I'd driven two hours to see had been gone longer than I'd understood.

I connected the cable. The router blinked to life, casting small green shadows across her face.

"You could come back with me," I said. "Start over."

She smiled, and it was the saddest thing I'd ever seen.

"Some riddles aren't meant to be solved," she said. "Only lived with."

I left knowing I might never return, that some cables connect nothing but distance, that the sphinx keeps her secrets for a reason. But the dog watched me through the window as I walked to my car, and in its eyes, I saw something like forgiveness.