The Riddle of Empty Rooms

Maya found the bottle of vitamin D supplements on his bedside table, exactly where he'd left them three months ago. The expiration date was still two years away. She stood in the doorway of the apartment they'd shared for seven years, her dog Luther pressing against her leg, sensing the tremor in her hands she couldn't quite suppress.

The hair on the pillow was the last thing she noticed—the gray strands that had appeared overnight during his final weeks. She'd run her fingers through it, promising she didn't care, that she loved him regardless. But he'd been vain about his appearance, right up until the chemotherapy took everything.

"You're like the sphinx," he'd told her once, early in their marriage, when she'd refused to explain why she was crying. "All riddles and no answers."

She'd laughed then, pressed her palm to his cheek. "Maybe you're just asking the wrong questions."

Now she stood in the middle of the living room, surrounded by boxes she'd packed but couldn't bring herself to move. On the kitchen counter, the goldfish bowl caught the afternoon light—a solitary fish swimming in endless circles, oblivious to the absence that had swallowed the apartment. David had bought it on a whim, saying they needed something alive in here, something that required care. A practice run, he'd called it, joking about children they never got around to having.

The fish swam to the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent expectation. Maya dropped a pinch of food into the water, watched the flakes drift downward like snow.

She found herself at his desk finally, pulling open the drawer where he kept his journals. The last entry was dated two days before he died. His handwriting had already begun to fail, letters slanting sharply toward the margin.

*The riddle isn't what happens next,* he'd written. *The riddle is that we keep pretending we have forever to figure it out.*

Maya closed the journal, pressed it to her chest. The dog whined softly, and she realized she was crying again—silent tears tracking down her face, catching in the smile lines around her mouth. She wasn't a sphinx anymore. She was just a woman who had loved and lost, standing in an apartment that felt too large and too small all at once.

The goldfish swam another lap. The vitamins sat on the nightstand. And somewhere in the space between memory and letting go, Maya understood finally that some riddles don't have answers—they just have the asking, over and over again, until you learn to live with the mystery of not knowing.