The Riddle in the Mirror

Maya stood before the bathroom mirror, tweezing another stray gray hair from her temple. At forty-three, she'd stopped counting them. The bathroom smelled faintly of the spinach smoothie she'd forced herself to drink that morning—her latest attempt at health, packed with enough vitamin C to cure a small village, yet she still felt hollow inside.

'You look tired,' David had said that morning, not unkindly, over coffee. He hadn't touched her in three months. Not since the miscarriage, that silent catastrophe they'd both agreed to process 'in their own time.' His time seemed to involve working late, coming home to collapse on the couch, and sleeping with his back to hers.

Maya rinsed her face, the cold water shocking her skin. She thought about her mother, who'd once told her that marriage was like being the Sphinx—eternal, inscrutable, and eventually, everyone stopped trying to solve your riddles and just took pictures for Instagram.

She dried her face and walked to the kitchen. David was there, making tea. For a moment, she considered asking him what had happened to them—where the laughter had gone, why his hands no longer sought hers in the dark, whether love could survive two people who'd forgotten how to speak the same language.

Instead she said: 'I bought more spinach.'

He nodded. 'Good. That's good.'

She watched him stir his tea, the spoon clinking rhythmically against the ceramic. Sometimes she thought the person she'd married was gone, replaced by this polite stranger who inhabited his body like a ghost haunting its own former life.

'Maya,' he said suddenly, not turning around. 'I'm sorry.'

She waited, heart hammering against her ribs.

'I keep waiting for it to get easier,' he whispered. 'And I think I've been waiting so long that I forgot how to be here with you.'

She crossed the kitchen and wrapped her arms around his waist from behind, burying her face in his shirt. He smelled of soap and something deeper—something she'd missed without knowing she was missing it.

'Me too,' she said.

They stood there as the evening deepened around them, two people beginning, slowly, to learn each other's riddles again.