The Riddle of Us

Maya's iphone lit up at 3 AM, that ghostly blue illumination across her pillow. Another message from him, already three months gone. She'd blocked him everywhere except this burner account she couldn't bring herself to delete.

You're haunting me, he'd written.

She felt like a zombie these days—alive but not living, moving through her marketing job with automated precision, responding to emails and Slack messages while something essential rotted inside. Her coworkers noticed nothing. She wore her professionalism like a fresh coat of paint over a crumbling wall.

Barnaby, her golden retriever, shifted at the foot of the bed. He was the only one who saw her disintegrate each night, the only witness to her ritual of reading those old messages like scripture, like they might somehow yield different words on the hundredth reading. He'd been Ethan's dog too, once.

The weight of it—it was a bear she carried everywhere now. Heavy and hibernating, dormant but suffocating. She couldn't bear to throw away his toothbrush. She couldn't bear to unfollow his mother. She couldn't bear the way her body still turned toward his side of the bed at night, muscle memory betraying her survival instinct.

And that was the riddle, wasn't it? The sphinx at the crossroads of her heart: What creature walks on two legs, cries on the inside, and pretends to be fine on the outside?

She opened the message thread. Her thumb hovered, that terrible freedom of the unsendable reply. Instead she deleted it—finally, finally—and turned off the phone. Barnaby lifted his head, ears perked at the sudden darkness.

"It's okay," she whispered to him, to herself. "Some riddles aren't meant to be solved. They're meant to be survived."

She closed her eyes and for the first time in three months, didn't picture his face. She pictured tomorrow instead, and the terrible, beautiful blankness of it.