The Riddle Between Us

The coaxial cable lay coiled on the floor like a dead snake, a relic of the night we'd spent drinking whiskey and watching terrible movies. That was three months before everything changed.

"You're like a sphinx," Elena had said, tracing the line of my jaw with her thumb. "All riddles and no answers."

I'd laughed then, leaning into her touch. We'd been friends for seven years, roommates for three, lovers for none—though the boundaries had grown increasingly porous. She wore my grandfather's fedora that night, the hat swallowing her dark hair, making her look like someone from a photograph I'd never seen.

Now, standing in her half-empty apartment, I understood the riddle she'd been posing all along. The answer wasn't in what we said, but in what we never allowed ourselves to speak.

Her cat, a haughty Siamese named Ramses, wound through my legs, purring with the confidence of someone who knew he'd outlasted us both. Elena had taken him in when his previous owner died, another example of her collecting broken things and trying to make them whole.

"I'm moving to Portland," she'd told me two weeks ago, not looking up from her packing. "There's nothing keeping me here."

The words had hung between us like smoke. I could have said something then—could have offered her the reasons to stay, the ones we'd both been avoiding for years. Instead I'd helped her tape up boxes, played the role of the supportive friend while my heart cracked along old fault lines.

I picked up the hat from where it lay on her bedside table. The brim was still slightly bent from where she'd crushed it in her hands that last night, when she'd finally asked the question she'd been carrying like a stone in her throat: "What are we so afraid of?"

I hadn't answered then. Standing in her empty room, with only the cable and the cat and the hat as witnesses, I finally let myself say it aloud to no one at all: "That we're already everything to each other, and that still might not be enough."

The sphinx's riddle solved too late, as they always are.