The Riddle of Silence

The Sphinx stared at me with that inscrutable gaze, as if it knew everything about grief and refused to share the answer. I'd come to Egypt to escape, but the monument's stone lips seemed to mock my attempt to outrun memory. My iPhone buzzed in my pocket—the seventh notification since dawn—but I ignored it. Back home, it was baseball season. Mark would've been texting me scores, updating me on the Giants' latest collapse, his messages punctuated with those ridiculous emoji-heavy predictions he'd been making since we were twelve-year-olds sharing bleacher seats and stale popcorn.

Mark had been dead three months now. Pancreatic cancer moved with the cruelty of a stolen base—unexpected, devastating, final.

A tour guide's voice drifted over from the viewing platform: "The Sphinx poses a riddle to all who gaze upon it. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?" The answer was man, crawling then walking then leaning on a cane. But the real riddle wasn't about legs or stages of life. The real riddle was how someone could exist so completely in your world—one half of your brain's oldest operating system—and then simply not exist anymore.

I pulled out my iPhone. Mark's last message sat there like a shrine: 'Game tonight. First pitch, 7:05. Don't bail like you did in '98.' I'd been meaning to reply for three months. 'Sorry' seemed inadequate. 'I miss you' felt like stating the obvious. So I'd done nothing.

The Sphinx's damaged face regarded me patiently. It had waited five thousand years; it could wait for me to figure out how to say goodbye to a friend who'd known me since before I knew myself.

I typed the message at last: 'Gonna catch tonight's game from a pyramid. Think you'd get a kick out of that.' I added the baseball emoji, then deleted it. Mark would've used three.

Then I added: 'I miss you, asshole.'

Send.

The message delivered into silence, into nothingness. But somehow, sending it to the universe felt better than letting it sit unsaid in my drafts folder. The Sphinx seemed to nod its stone head, as if I'd finally solved its riddle: grief walks on however many legs it needs to, but it only moves forward when you let yourself speak to the empty spaces.