The Riddle of Goodbye

The urn sat on Maya's mantelpiece, small and unassuming. Not for David—her best friend of twenty years, gone at forty-two—but for his goldfish. A ridiculous neon-orange thing he'd won at a carnival, lived far longer than any goldfish had a right to.

She stood in David's apartment that now smelled like someone else. His mother was already boxing things. Maya had claimed the dog first—Barnaby, a rescue with one ear and a suspicious streak—but the goldfish had been an afterthought. Now she watched it dart in its bowl, oblivious that its person was gone.

"You're taking the fish?" David's mother had asked. "Really?"

"He talked to it," Maya had said. "Every morning."

It was true. David would lean over the bowl, murmuring about deadlines and failed dates and the peculiar existential dread of turning forty alone. The fish had been his confessor. Maya envied it.

She'd envied a lot of things about David, lately. His ease in his own skin. The way he'd quit corporate law to paint badly and happily. The fact that he'd died doing something foolish and beautiful—hiking alone in the mountains, chasing a sunset he'd described as "the kind that makes you believe in something larger."

Something larger. Maya sat on his couch now, surrounded by half-packed boxes, and thought about belief. About the sphinx they'd seen in Egypt two years ago—how David had stared up at it, smiling.

"What's the riddle?" she'd asked.

"The riddle is that we're all just passing through," he'd said. "Everything ends. The question is what you do with the middle."

Barnaby nudged her hand, whining softly. She buried her face in his fur, smelling comfort and loyalty and all the things she couldn't give David in life. She should have visited more. Should have said things. Should have—

The phone rang. A colleague from her firm, asking about a contract she'd filed wrong. The mundane collision of living while someone you loved had stopped.

"I can't talk," she said.

She hung up and watched the goldfish swim. Its tiny world, contained and complete. David had been right about the riddle, she decided. Everything ended. The goldfish would die. Barnaby would die. She would die.

Maya stood and carried the bowl toward the door, Barnaby at her heels. Somewhere in this city, people were falling in love. Somewhere, someone was saying words they'd regret not saying. Somewhere, a sphinx sat in the sand, indifferent to all of them.

She stepped into her own middle, carrying the weight of everything she'd learned too late.