The Riddle of Goodbye

The sphinx moth battered itself against the porch screen, drawn by the kitchen light Marcus had left burning. Three in the morning, and he was still awake, watching the creature's desperate thrashing, thinking about Elena's voice on the phone earlier that evening.

"I'm done asking riddles I already know the answers to," she'd said, and the silence between them had been so absolute he'd thought the line had gone dead.

They'd been married twenty-three years. He knew the geography of her face better than his own — the constellation of freckles across her nose, the way her left eyebrow rose when she was about to deliver a devastating assessment she'd kept to herself for days. But somewhere along the way, he'd stopped listening for what she wasn't saying.

The lightning struck then, so close the house seemed to inhale. A sudden white flash that illuminated everything: the half-empty wine glass, his unopened briefcase, the photo of their wedding day stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a bull. A joke gift from his brother, years ago — stubborn as a bull, that was Marcus, according to anyone who'd ever tried to tell him something he didn't want to hear.

The sphinx moth had stopped moving. He pressed his finger to the screen beside it, feeling the residual warmth of the day still trapped in the glass.

"You think you can just bullshittingly exist," Elena had told him once, early on, before she learned that some distances weren't bridges but boundaries. "You think being present is the same thing as being there."

He'd laughed. He'd thought it was charming banter. He hadn't understood she was handing him a map to the precise moment when she would stop waiting for him to arrive.

The thunder came finally, a low rumble that shook the floorboards. Marcus picked up his phone, scrolled to her name, typed: I don't want to be right anymore. I want to be home.

He watched his thumb hover over send. The sphinx moth began to beat its wings again, slower now, a rhythm like something remembered rather than something felt.

Outside, the rain started to fall. He deleted the message without sending it. Some riddles, he understood now, weren't meant to be solved — only survived.