The Riddle in the Fridge

The spinach was wilting in the crisper drawer, much like my marriage. I stood in the kitchen at 2 AM, the hum of the refrigerator the only sound in our too-quiet apartment. Somewhere in the bedroom, David was probably asleep, or pretending to be.

"You're like the sphinx," my friend Elena had told me earlier that evening, nursing her third martini at the dive bar where we'd met to discuss my increasingly incomprehensible life. "All these riddles, no answers. What do you actually want, Maya?"

I hadn't known how to answer then. I didn't know now.

The cat, Barnaby, wound around my ankles, his orange fur glowing in the refrigerator light. David had brought him home three years ago as a "relationship test"—if we could keep something alive together, maybe we could keep us alive, too. The irony wasn't lost on me that the cat was thriving while whatever David and I had was decomposing faster than the spinach.

I thought about Elena's question. What did I want?

I wanted to stop feeling like I was living someone else's life. I wanted to stop having conversations with David that circled the same exhausted topics—his mother's disapproval, my stalled career, the mortgage on this apartment we'd bought with such optimistic foolishness. I wanted something to actually mean something again.

Barnaby meowed, demanding food, and I found myself laughing. A sphinx would know the answer. A sphinx would pose the riddle and wait for someone to solve it or die trying. But I wasn't asking riddles anymore. I was done with the mysteries and the quiet games.

I closed the refrigerator door, plunging us back into darkness. Spinach could wait. David could wait. Tomorrow, I would call Elena and suggest coffee. Real coffee, at a decent hour. And maybe I'd finally tell her what I'd been too afraid to say.

That some riddles don't have answers, only the courage to stop asking them.