The Riddle of Waiting

The funeral was over, everyone had left, but Elena remained by the graveside, clutching her father's battered fedora. The hat smelled of tobacco and rain, of fifty years of weathering storms both literal and metaphorical. She'd hated this hat growing up—how it perpetually sat on the hall table's wooden sphinx, its pitted face staring blankly at anyone who passed through the front door.

Her father had collected riddles the way some men collected stamps. His favorite: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? He'd tell it at dinner parties, his eyes twinkling behind whiskey glasses. The answer—man—struck her as profound then, cruel now. He'd died at dusk, his body collapsing like a riddle whose answer had finally been exhausted.

On the mantelpiece at home, his goldfish circled its bowl in endless loops, its three-second memory a cruel joke he'd found hilarious. "The perfect pet," he'd say, "always surprised to see you." Elena had secretly named it Oedipus, after the man who'd solved the sphinx's riddle only to discover the answer destroyed him.

Now she understood: we're all swimming in circles, forgetting and rediscovering the same truths. The sphinx hadn't been destroyed by Oedipus's answer—she'd been waiting for someone to finally ask the right question. Her father had spent his life collecting answers when he should have been questioning why we're so desperate to solve ourselves.

Elena placed the hat on her head. It was too large, slipping down over her ears. The sphinx in the cemetery—weathered stone, wings folded—seemed almost to smile. Some riddles aren't meant to be solved. They're meant to sit with you, in the quiet, while the goldfish forgets it's swimming and simply swims again.