The Riddle of Departures

LAX through security at 2 AM felt like crossing into another dimension. Maya sat at the gate, palm trees swaying beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows like drunken revelers at a party that ended hours ago. Her iPhone glowed with a text she'd already read twelve times: *I don't think I can do this anymore.*

The baseball ticket stub from their first date sat in her wallet, softened by three years of friction against her thumb. Jacob had taken her to a Dodgers game on the hottest day of July, bought overpriced beer, pretended to understand the innings she explained with earnest enthusiasm. They'd left early, sun-drunk and sweat-slick, and he'd kissed her against a concrete pillar outside the stadium while fireworks erupted overhead.

Now she was flying to Cairo alone—something they'd planned together for their anniversary. Her suitcase contained his sphinx paperweight, wrapped carefully in a scarf he'd given her. The irony wasn't lost on her. The sphinx had guarded its secrets for millennia, and somehow she'd thought she could solve the riddle of another person in three years.

Her palm still bore the faint indentation where she'd worn her commitment ring until last week. The ring itself was in her carry-on, weighing more than its modest carat weight should allow.

A woman across the gate wept silently into her phone, and Maya wondered if she too was leaving someone behind, or returning to someone she shouldn't. The iPhone buzzed again—Jacob, calling. She watched it ring, the screen illuminating the dark terminal like some oracle demanding an answer she wasn't ready to give.

The sphinx's riddle had been about what walked on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening. Nobody mentioned the part where you had to learn to walk alone all over again.

Maya declined the call, turned off the phone, and watched the first hint of dawn touch the palm trees. Some riddles, she decided, weren't meant to be solved by someone else.