The Riddle of Empty Rooms

Maya watched her mother's hand tremble over the pill organizer, each compartment a tiny sarcophagus containing a daily **vitamin** regimen that no one remembered if she actually took. The ***iphone*** on the nightstand glowed with unanswered messages from colleagues who didn't understand that some absences couldn't be explained away by a busy week.

"You look tired," her mother said, her voice cracking like dry leaves. She traced the lines on Maya's ***palm*** with fingers that had once held her so securely, now reduced to mapping unfamiliar territory on her own daughter's skin. "The ***bear*** is coming back."

Maya stiffened. The bear had been her mother's name for depression, that heavy creature that hibernated in the corners of their small apartment for years, emerging without warning to crush the air from rooms. It had been gone for a decade, or so Maya had allowed herself to believe.

"There's no bear, Mom."

"There's always a bear." Her mother's eyes were lucid in a way that frightened Maya more than the confusion. "That's the riddle, love. The ***sphinx*** at the door asks the same question every morning, and the answer is never what you think it will be."

Maya's phone buzzed again — David, wondering if she was coming home tonight, if home was still their apartment or if it had somehow become this hospital room with its sterile light and the smell of deteriorating bodies. She thought about all the riddles she'd failed to solve lately: why she couldn't say I love you anymore, why success felt like a performance, why her mother's forgetting seemed sometimes more honest than her own remembering.

"What question?" Maya asked finally.

"Who are you when no one is watching." Her mother smiled, a small, terrible thing. "And the answer changes every single day."

Maya pressed her forehead against her mother's palm and for the first time in months, she didn't check her phone to see who needed her, who wanted something, who could be disappointed. She let herself be nobody at all, just a weight in a darkening room, while somewhere in the distance, the bear began to stir.