The Riddle of Goodbye

The orange light of sunset hit the stained glass in exactly the way it used to when she was still here. I sat on the bench beneath the stone sphinx we'd discovered together seven years ago, its riddle-worn face eroded by rain but still asking questions neither of us could answer.

I pulled the crushed fedora from my pocket. Her hat. She'd left it on my windowsill the night she told me she was marrying him—a man who could give her the stability I couldn't, not with my running-from-everything approach to life, my studio apartment that doubled as my painting space, my bank account that fluctuated like the tides.

"You're my best friend," she'd said, "but friendship isn't the same thing as being able to build a life together."

The sphinx stared impassively. In Greek mythology, she devoured those who couldn't solve her riddle. Friendship, I'd learned, could be just as ruthless.

I remembered running through the rain with her after that terrible gallery opening where the critic had called my work "derivative." We'd ended up at this very park, drenched and laughing, and found the sphinx statue half-hidden behind overgrown lilacs. She'd climbed onto its stone back, posed like an Egyptian queen, and I'd captured her in watercolors—confident, wild, immortal.

That painting hung in my bedroom now. It was the only thing of hers I'd kept, until she left the hat.

The orange faded to purple. A couple walked past, holding hands. I didn't recognize them.

Funny how the same word could mean everything and nothing. "Friend" — what she called me when she needed to put distance between us. What I called myself when I tried to rationalize why I wasn't enough. What we'd been, truly, until we weren't anymore.

I placed the hat on the sphinx's head. It didn't fit. Nothing did anymore.

Some riddles aren't meant to be solved. Some endings aren't meant to be fixed. Some friends, you learn, become strangers long before they stop calling.