The Riddle of Empty Shelves
Maya stood in the pharmacy aisle at 2 AM, staring at the wall of supplements. Vitamin D, B-complex, magnesium, zinc—each promising to fix something she hadn't realized was broken until Elias left. Three weeks of silence, and she was still taking her vitamins like ritual, like prayer, like something that might eventually make her whole again.
He'd been a human sphinx, really—enigmatic, half-truths and guarded smiles, his real self hidden behind layers of irony and deflection. She'd spent years trying to solve him, treating his moods like riddles she could crack if she just tried harder. If she just loved harder. If she just asked the right questions.
"What do you want from me?" she'd asked the night he packed.
He'd looked at her with those unreadable eyes and said nothing. That was the answer, she realized now. The sphinx doesn't explain. It simply waits.
Outside, lightning fractured the sky—sudden, violent, illuminating the parking lot in harsh strobe flashes. Summer storms in the city were always like this: brief and beautiful, leaving everything wet and changed in their wake. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass.
Her phone buzzed. Unknown number.
Maya's heart seized—then released. She didn't answer. Some riddles weren't meant to be solved. Some people were sphinxes because they had nothing inside worth finding.
She grabbed a bottle of vitamin C from the shelf—ironic, really, since she'd stopped caring about immune systems the day she realized loving him had been its own kind of illness. The fluorescent lights hummed above her, commercial and bright and utterly indifferent to her epiphany.
The cashier didn't look up. Outside, the storm had already passed, leaving behind that electric after-smell, that feeling that something enormous had happened while no one was watching.
Maya walked home under streetlamps, vitamin bottle heavy in her pocket. Some nights, she thought, you just had to stop trying to solve the riddle and start living with the mystery. Some nights, you made your own lightning.