The Riddle of Hollow Days

You know that feeling when you've been at your desk for six hours and realize you haven't actually thought a real thought the entire time? That's the zombie state—the walking dead of corporate America, moving through quarterly reports and Zoom meetings like automatons.

I was deep in it when Sarah dropped an orange on my desk. Just a simple orange, bright against the gray of my cubicle, and for some reason it nearly made me cry.

"Eat something," she said. Her hair, usually this vibrant auburn cascade, had gone brittle and dull since the chemotherapy started. She wouldn't talk about it—wouldn't talk about anything real, anymore.

"I'm not hungry," I said.

"You're a friend, Elena. Friends notice when friends are disappearing."

She meant it literally. I'd lost fifteen pounds since David left. Since the promotion I didn't want. Since everything became this endless gray loop of waking up, surviving, sleeping.

"I'm fine," I lied.

Sarah looked at me with that sphinx-like stillness she'd developed lately—like she knew something profound and wasn't telling. The Sphinx asked riddles and destroyed those who couldn't answer. Sarah just watched me self-destruct and offered me fruit.

"My mother used to say oranges were for funerals," she said, apropos of nothing. "In our village. She'd place them by the dead because they look like little suns, and the dead need light to find their way."

I peeled the orange. The scent hit me like a memory I couldn't quite place—childhood, maybe, or some version of myself that still believed in things like renewal and fresh starts.

"Are you dying?" I asked, finally.

"Aren't we all?" She smiled, but her eyes stayed sad. "But no more than usual. The hair grows back. Everything does."

I took a segment. It impossibly, miraculously, tasted like hope.

"We're not dead yet," she said.

"No," I said. "But some days, the living feels harder."

"That's because you're trying to solve the wrong riddle." She stood to leave. "The Sphinx doesn't ask 'what walks on four legs then two.' She asks 'what makes life worth living.' You've been answering 'survival.'"

The orange was still bright on my desk. A tiny sun. Something to find my way by.

"What's the right answer?" I called after her.

She turned back, hair catching the fluorescent light, and for the first time in months, she looked genuinely alive.

"That's the easy part, Elena. Connection. Moments like this. And maybe, just maybe, believing that something better is waiting on the other side of all this gray."

I ate the whole orange. And for the first time in a long time, I didn't feel like a zombie at all.