The Riddle of Us

The orange light of predawn spilled across your pillow as you slept, mouth slightly open, that tiny smudge of drool that used to annoy me but now made my chest ache with something too complicated to name. I should have been getting ready for work. Instead, I stood there holding my iphone like a weapon, like a witness, thumb hovering over the text that would end everything—again.

We'd been through this before. The same circular arguments, the same accusations, the same pretending we didn't know exactly what was wrong. You called me a sphinx once, said I was impossible to read, all riddle and no answer. But the truth was simpler: I'd told you everything, over and over, and you still kept asking because you didn't like the answers.

The weight of it—I felt it physically now, something heavy and dark between my shoulder blades, something I'd been bearing for months without name. A bear hibernating in the marrow of my bones. I'd convinced myself love was supposed to feel like sacrifice, like carrying something enormous through snow, but maybe that was just the story I'd told myself to stay.

I looked at your phone on the nightstand, dark and dormant. The notifications would start soon. Work demands, friends' updates, the endless scroll that passed for living now. We'd met eight years ago before screens ate everything, back when we still looked at each other's faces when we spoke. Now even our fights were mediated through glass.

The orange deepened toward gold. You stirred, eyes fluttering open, and for a second I saw genuine confusion before recognition settled in—that subtle hardening I'd stopped noticing until now. "You're up early," you said, not really asking.

"Yeah," I said. "I think I am." And I realized: the riddle wasn't me. The riddle was why I'd kept trying to solve someone who didn't want to be known. The sphinx had been right all along. Some questions don't have answers—they just have endings.

I pocketed my phone. The message remained unsent. Some things deserved to be said face to face, even if it broke everything. Especially then.