The Riddle of Leaving

The sphinx statue watched from the bookshelf, its stone eyes accusatory in the morning light. Marcus's trophy from that Cairo trip—before everything fell apart. I swallowed my **vitamin** D supplement with lukewarm coffee, choking down the pill like I was choking down the memory of him.

Three weeks after the breakup, I'd taken up **running**. Not because I enjoyed it—God, no—but because the rhythmic pounding of pavement gave me something to feel besides the hollow ache in my chest. The city blurred at 6 AM, streetlights flickering out as dawn broke over the skyline, my breath visible in the cold air. Each step was a small rebellion against the inertia that wanted to keep me in bed, staring at the ceiling where his ceiling fan used to click.

I bought fresh **spinach** at the market, trying to convince myself I could become someone who ate deliberately, who chose nourishment over convenience. The green leaves wilted in my refrigerator, a metaphor for everything I'd let slide during those two years with him. wilted ambitions. wilted friendships. wilted self.

The sphinx seemed to smile. I'd asked Marcus once why he loved it—that riddle-guardian with the body of a lion and the head of a human. "Because," he'd said, tracing its stone wings with reverent fingers, "she knows that the most dangerous monsters are the ones we create ourselves."

I threw the spinach into a pan with garlic and olive oil, watching it transform. Cooking for one felt like a foreign language I was slowly learning to pronounce.

The riddle wasn't what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening. The riddle was how to rebuild yourself when someone else had become part of your foundation. How to separate your dreams from theirs without both collapsing.

The running shoes by the door wore thin. The vitamins on the counter became routine. The spinach got eaten, eventually. And one Tuesday, I carried the sphinx down to the curb, leaving it for someone else's mystery.

Some riddles don't have answers. Some endings are just beginnings that don't announce themselves.