The Riddle of Starting Over

David stood in his kitchen at 2 AM, staring at a pan of wilting spinach like it held the answers to his ruined life. Three weeks post-divorce and he'd already mastered the art of nocturnal misery. The spinach sputtered, mocking him.

He felt like a zombie — not the pop-culture brain-eater, but something worse: a man walking through his own life half-alive, going through motions that no longer belonged to anyone. The house echoed with a silence that had teeth.

His eyes landed on the goldfish bowl on the counter. Sarah had left it, of course. The fish, a sad orange thing named Captain Fin, swam in endless circles. They say goldfish have three-second memories. Maybe that was a blessing. Maybe Captain Fin kept rediscovering his tiny kingdom every moment, perpetually surprised by the plastic castle.

"You're lucky," David told the fish. "You don't know what you've lost."

In the bedroom, his phone lit up with a notification from work: another crisis that could wait until morning. He used to care about marketing strategy. Now he felt like the Sphinx — some ancient creature posed at the crossroads, demanding answers to riddles he'd forgotten how to solve. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? The answer was David himself: whole at dawn, broken by noon, crawling toward dusk.

The radio played softly, baseball scores from a game that had ended hours ago. He remembered teaching his son to throw a perfect spiral. Tommy was eight now, living with Sarah, probably sleeping in baseball-themed sheets David had bought him. The crack of the bat, the smell of hot dogs and cut grass, the way Tommy's face lit up when he connected — those memories were archaeological artifacts now, buried under layers of lawyer fees and awkward custody exchanges.

David turned off the stove. The spinach was overcooked, reduced to a dark green mush that matched his mood perfectly. He scraped it into the trash can, next to Captain Fin's bowl.

"New beginning tomorrow," he whispered, the same lie he'd been telling himself for twenty-one days.

Outside, the first hint of dawn bruised the sky. David watched it come, another zombie greeting another morning, while somewhere across town, a goldfish swam its circles, oblivious to the riddles that would remain unsolved.