The Riddle of Us

Maya traced the silver strand in her hair, the one that appeared last month, the morning after Julian told her he was leaving. Now it sat among the chestnut waves like a testimony she hadn't asked for.

She sat at the kitchen table in their apartment—that was still hers for another eleven days—peeling an orange. The citrus scent cut through the stale coffee smell, through the accumulated weight of unpacked boxes. Julian had always made a mess of peeling oranges, leaving ragged white pith clinging to the fruit, while she could strip one clean in seconds, the skin coming away in a perfect spiral.

He was in the living room now, packing his books. She could hear the rhythm of it: cardboard folding, tape tearing, the soft thud of hardcovers. For three years, they'd read together in bed, legs tangled, swapping passages and underlines. Now those same books were being sorted into his boxes and hers, an archaeology of shared taste becoming separate territories.

"You're staring," Julian said from the doorway. His hair was messy—he'd been running his hands through it, his nervous tic she once found endearing. Now it just exhausted her.

"I'm peeling an orange," she said, not looking up.

"Maya."

"What do you want me to say?"

He didn't answer. The silence between them had become something else lately—not comfortable, not expectant, but inhabited. Like the space between two people who've said everything they can say, and what's left are the things they can't.

She finished with the orange, segmented it, and placed half on the table between them. An offering, or a test.

"Remember that night in Cairo?" he asked. "When we tried to find the sphinx after midnight and got lost in the dark?"

She remembered. They'd been drunk on cheap wine and the terrifying bigness of being young somewhere ancient. The sphinx had loomed out of the sand, half-eroded, patient. They'd stood before it, holding hands, and she'd felt that they were part of something that would outlast them.

She ate her half of the orange, section by section. The juice was sharp, almost cruel.

"We asked it questions," she said. "Remember? You asked if we'd make it."

"And?"

Maya looked at him then—at his familiar face, at the new lines around his eyes, at the way he stood with his weight on one hip. He'd stopped doing that in year two, started doing it again when he met Elena.

"The sphinx doesn't answer," she said. "That's the whole point."

He took the other half of the orange, weighed it in his palm like he was deciding something.

"I wanted it to be different,"

"I know."

"I still want—"

"Don't," she said. "Please."

He nodded, defeated. The moment stretched, thin and terrible.

Then she stood up, went to the bathroom, and found the pair of scissors she'd been using to cut herself some bangs two weeks ago—impulsively, recklessly, trying to become someone else.

When she returned to the kitchen, Julian was still holding his half of the orange, uneaten.

Maya pulled the silver strand from her hair and cut it off.

"What are you doing?"

"Starting over," she said, dropping the hair into the trash can under the sink. It fell with the coffee grounds and the orange peels, indistinguishable from the rest of what they were leaving behind.

He took a bite of the orange. He looked like he might cry.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I know," she said again. "That's why you have to go."

He finished the orange, wiped his sticky hands on his jeans—another thing she'd once loved about him, how unperformative he was—and went back to the living room. The packing sounds resumed.

Maya sat at the table alone and waited for the apartment to become hers.