The Riddle of Leaving

The sphinx of cracked plaster sat on the mantle, its painted eyes watching us divide twenty years of marriage into cardboard boxes. David wanted it. He'd always been drawn to things that asked more questions than they answered—me included.

"You take the goldfish," he said, not looking up from his cataloging of DVDs. "It was your mother's aquarium."

The goldfish bowl sat on the kitchen counter, its solitary orange inmate glubbing aimlessly. Mom had died two years ago, and the fish—now ancient for its kind—kept swimming in its endless circles, oblivious to the wider world. Some days, that felt like a mastery skill I should've learned.

"I don't want the fish," I said. "You take it."

He sighed, that familiar exhalation that used to mean patience and now meant exhaustion. "Sarah, we talked about this. You're moving to the apartment. There's no room."

No room for the fish. No room for the sphinx. No room, ultimately, for us.

The baseball sat on the coffee table between us—a signed ball from some game we'd attended in those early years when we still held hands at sporting events, when the crack of the bat and roar of the crowd had felt like the soundtrack of something real and lasting. Now it was just leather and twine gathering dust.

"What about the baseball?" I asked. "You bought it."

"I don't want it," he said sharply, then softened. "I don't want any of the things that remind me of... before."

Before the IVF failures. Before the silent dinners. Before the distance between our twin beds had grown impassable.

The sphinx's riddle had always seemed simple: what walks on four legs, then two, then three? But the real riddle was how two people could stand on two legs each, together, and still fall apart. How we could be right next to each other and miles away.

The goldfish surfaced, gulped air, sank back down.

"Fine," I said. "I'll take the sphinx. You keep the fish. We throw away the baseball."

David looked at me really looked at me, for the first time in months. "That's fair. That's... that's fair."

We packed in silence. The sphinx went into my box. The goldfish bowl was wrapped in newspaper. The baseball went into the trash, along with everything else we couldn't bear to carry forward into our separate, smaller lives.