The Riddle of What Remains

The art installation was called 'Sphinx'—an enormous steel face half-buried in the gallery floor, its expression deliberately, infuriatingly blank. I stood before it for twenty minutes, waiting for something to reveal itself, which is exactly how I'd felt during the last six months of our friendship.

'I don't get it,' Sarah said, checking her watch. She was always checking something—her phone, her watch, her exits. 'It's just a face. Are we done here? I have that spin class at seven.'

'You're always running somewhere,' I said, and immediately regretted how petty it sounded.

She laughed, but the sound had gotten sharp lately, like something breaking. 'Better than stagnating, right?'

The week we stopped speaking, I'd started swimming laps at the YMCA every morning. Something about being underwater, muffled and blue and alone. I liked how my thoughts got murky down there, how everything—including whatever she'd said to me that final night—became indistinct, silt settling on the bottom.

That night was supposed to be celebratory dinner. She'd ordered the spinach salad, picking through it with this meticulous concentration while I waited for her to tell me what was wrong. Instead she'd leveled me with that look—appraising, distant—and said she couldn't do this anymore. Couldn't do what, exactly? She never clarified. Like the sphinx, she offered only riddles.

'This thing,' she said now, gesturing vaguely at the steel face. 'It's asking us something, right? That's the point.'

'The sphinx asked a riddle,' I said. 'Answer wrong and you died.'

She didn't laugh. The fluorescent lights caught the silver strands in her hair—when had that happened? 'Maybe the riddle's not for us to answer. Maybe we're just supposed to sit with the not-knowing.'

We left without speaking further. She ran to catch her train, calling over her shoulder that we should do this again soon. I stood on the platform watching her become smaller, the way everything does eventually.

That night, floating in my pool at 5 AM, I thought about how some people enter your life like a tide—you can enjoy it while it lasts, but eventually it always pulls back. The trick is learning to swim in the stillness that follows.