The Riddle of Forgetting

Margaret watched the storm from her window, each bolt of lightning illuminating the rooms she'd spent forty years filling with Arthur's things. The books, the maps, the obsidian sphinx paperweight he'd brought back from Cairo—artifacts of a marriage that had become less a partnership than an accumulation.

On the mantelpiece, the goldfish bowl caught the storm's flickering light. The fish, named Memory despite Arthur's insistence that goldfish forgot everything after three seconds, swam its endless circles. Margaret sometimes envied it.

"They don't actually forget," Arthur had said, placing the sphinx on her desk the day they met. "That's a myth. They remember quite well."

He'd been teaching ancient mythology then, full of riddles and koans about the nature of truth. The sphinx had been his favorite: the creature that devoured those who couldn't answer its question. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?

Man. The answer was always man.

But Arthur had never asked her the real questions. The ones about why they'd never had children, or why he disappeared into his study for hours, or why, in the end, he'd left her everything but the one thing she needed: words spoken aloud, explanations given, mysteries unraveled.

The lightning struck closer now, and Margaret found herself before the bookshelf where she'd found his letter yesterday. Just two sentences: *I was never the man you thought. The sphinx devoured me long ago.*

She looked at the goldfish, swimming its patient circles, and thought about memory—about what we choose to remember, what we force ourselves to forget, and what, like Arthur's riddles, remains perpetually unsolved. Perhaps some sphinxes never stopped asking their questions. Perhaps some marriages were just long attempts at answering wrong.

Outside, the storm broke. Margaret fed the fish, wondering if it would remember tomorrow, or if, like her, it simply learned to swim through the same waters pretending they were new.