The Riddle of Goodbye

The lightning struck just as I stepped onto the porch, illuminating the rain-slicked driveway where Marcus's car used to park. Six months after the funeral, and still my body reacted to storms the way it had when we were married—waiting for his hand on my shoulder, his voice murmuring something about old houses and bad wiring. Instead, I pulled my hat lower against the downpour and grabbed the umbrella from the brass stand by the door.

I'd taken up running after he died, something about the rhythmic thud of sneakers on pavement drowning out the silence in the house. Tonight, though, the woods behind our property called to me. Marcus had loved these woods, had spent our last anniversary building the trail that wound through them like a question mark.

A flash of copper caught my eye—a fox, its tail disappearing between the oaks. Marcus had called himself the fox when we played chess, claiming his unpredictable moves were 'fox cunning.' Following the animal felt inevitable, like everything else since the heart attack that took him at forty-seven.

The trail opened suddenly into a clearing Marcus had cleared months before his death. In its center stood the sphinx statue he'd surprised me with for my thirty-fifth birthday—a replica we'd found at that estate sale in Vermont, her stone face etched with that eternal inscrutable smile. The rain had stopped, but my heart kept its erratic rhythm.

"The riddle was never what I thought," I whispered, tracing the weathered limestone of her wing. Marcus had left this journal here, wrapped in plastic beneath her base. I'd read it a dozen times, each time hoping the final entry would change. But cancer—or whatever had been eating at him those last months—doesn't negotiate with riddles or revise its ending.

The fox reappeared, sitting on its haunches at the clearing's edge, watching. Not a symbol. Just a wild thing, hungry and alive. The lightning flashed again, distant now, and I thought about how Marcus had hated being called wise. 'I'm just figuring it out same as you,' he'd say, pressing his forehead to mine. 'We're all sphinxes to each other.'

I pulled off my hat, letting the rain rinse the sweat from my hair. Some riddles don't have answers. Some sphinxes never explain their smiles. And some love stories don't end—they just keep running, like a heartbeat in an empty house, like fox prints in the mud, like lightning illuminating what you already knew but weren't ready to see.

I started back toward the house, leaving the sphinx to her eternal riddle, leaving the fox to its hunger. Tomorrow I'd sell the house. Tomorrow I'd stop waiting for storms to bring him back. Tonight, I let myself run through the rain, finally, irrevocably, alone.