The Riddle of the Sphinx

The papaya arrived on a white porcelain plate, glistening with lime juice. Elena picked at it with her fork, her iphone face-down on the table beside her breakfast. David hadn't texted back in three days.

"You're going to burn," her mother said, already turning pinker than the fruit on Elena's plate. "Put on sunscreen."

Elena nodded absentmely. They were in Egypt, her mother's midlife crisis pilgrimage to see the sphinx before—well, before something happened. Before her mother got too old to travel, before she died, before something equally dramatic and unsaid.

The vitamin supplements her mother insisted she take every morning rattled in her purse. Elena had stopped taking them weeks ago. What good were vitamins when you were slowly suffocating in a relationship that had lost its oxygen?

At the pyramids later that afternoon, surrounded by tourists and vendors selling alabaster figurines, Elena found herself standing before the Great Sphinx. The creature's human face eroded by millennia, its lion body powerful and still, watching something beyond the horizon.

"What's it staring at?" a little boy asked his mother nearby.

"The future," she said. "Or the past. It's all the same to something that old."

Elena's phone buzzed. David. Finally. Her hands trembled as she unlocked it, water bottle sweating onto her dress in the desert heat.

*Can we talk?*

Three words. A question that could undo everything. She'd wanted this—wanted him to reach out, wanted to break the silence that had stretched between them like a continent. But now that the moment had arrived, she felt only exhaustion.

"You okay?" her mother asked, noticing Elena's stillness.

Elena looked up at the sphinx, at that weathered face that had witnessed countless human heartbreaks, countless lovers parting, countless tiny dramas that seemed enormous in the moment and meant nothing to the stone.

"Fine," she said, typing *Not now* and slipping the phone back into her bag.

Later, floating in the hotel pool at sunset, she ordered another papaya from the bar. The water carried her weight, and for the first time in months, she felt something like peace. The sphinx had taught her something after all: some riddles weren't meant to be solved. Some questions weren't meant to be answered.

She would take her vitamins tomorrow. She would call David next week. Or maybe she wouldn't. The sphinx would keep its secrets, and she would keep hers.