The Riddle of Us

The sphinx in the museum garden watched me with those stone eyes, riddle-less and eternal. Water pooled in the hollows of its paws from the morning rain, gathering like tears in weathered skin. I stood there clutching my iPhone, thumb hovering over your name, three years after you'd left.

You used to say our relationship was like living with a goldfish in a bowl—beautiful, contained, endlessly circling the same small space. Neither of us could breathe outside it. The metaphor had seemed romantic then, in that apartment with the sagging floorboards and the goldfish we'd named Aristotle because he stared at us with philosophical judgment.

But Aristotle died the week after you moved out. I found him floating on the surface of his bowl, and in some irrational moment of grief, I flushed him down the toilet. Let him swim in the sewer instead of our abandoned love nest. That's when I understood: you were the water and I was the fish, and without you, I was just gasping for something that couldn't sustain me.

The sphinx still stared, indifferent to my mid-life crisis. Behind me, a tour group clustered around a guide explaining something about mythological creatures and their inscrutable nature. I wasn't listening. I was watching the water ripple in the sphinx's stone paws, thinking about how everything beautiful eventually erodes.

My iPhone lit up with a notification—not you, never you anymore. Just a reminder about a dental cleaning. The banality of it was almost funny. This device held five years of messages between us, thousands of photographs, evidence that we'd existed, that we'd mattered to each other. Now it was just a pocket-sized archive of someone who'd become a stranger.

The sphinx asked nothing, offered nothing. Just witnessed.

I walked away from the statue, leaving it to its eternal vigil. The goldfish had been right all along—eventually, you run out of oxygen. But somehow, even then, you keep swimming.