The Riddle of Us

The goldfish had been dying for three weeks.

That was how long it had been since Maya moved out, leaving behind the crystal bowl on the windowsill, the fish inside swimming in its own filth because neither of us could remember whose turn it was to feed it. Now the water was cloudy, thick with neglect, and the fish - improbably named Atlas - floated near the surface, gulping with that desperate, open-mouthed rhythm that meant the end was close.

I should have flushed it weeks ago. But keeping it alive felt like the last thread connecting us to something, even if that something was just shared irresponsibility.

"You're still staring at it," Sophie said from the doorway. She had her arms crossed, her work clothes still on, and I knew that posture. That was the posture of someone who'd been doing all the emotional labor in a relationship for too long.

"He looks worse today."

"It's a fish, David. It's not an metaphor."

But it was. Of course it was. The water had grown murky with everything we weren't saying, everything I wasn't giving, and there she was on the other side of the glass - my own personal sphinx, posing the same riddle night after night: *What happens to love when you stop feeding it?*

I'd been answering wrong for months. I'd been answering with silence, with late nights at the office, with the careful distance of someone who'd already left but hadn't bothered to tell anyone.

Sophie walked over to the bowl. Her reflection joined mine in the glass, two ghosts hovering over a dying world.

"I'm not moving back in," she said quietly. "Even if you finally clean the tank."

The water rippled as Atlas made another desperate circuit, his orange scales dulling in the evening light. Some sphinxes don't have answers. Some sphinxes just watch while you drown yourself slowly, learning too late that you were always the one who needed to say something first.