The Riddle We Never Answered

Maya sat across from me in the dimly lit bar, her gray hair wild around her shoulders like she'd been fighting wind and losing. We used to finish each other's sentences. Now she stared at her iPhone, thumb hovering over messages from a man who'd promised her forever but delivered exactly four years.

"He asked the riddle," she said, not looking up. "You know the one. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in evening?"

"The sphinx," I said. "It's a sphinx riddle."

"No, that's the answer. Man. Crawling, walking, leaning on a cane. The sphinx is the one who asks, and if you can't answer, she eats you alive."

Maya's phone lit up with his name again. Her thumb trembled. In college philosophy, we'd spent hours deconstructing existential questions over cheap wine, certain we'd solve the riddle of being human before we turned thirty. Now she was forty-two and the sphinx had her by the throat, demanding to know what she was becoming.

"I cut my hair," she said suddenly. "Chopped it all off yesterday. He always said he loved long hair. Liked to wrap it around his fist."

She reached up and touched the jagged ends. I remembered the summer we were twenty, weaving flowers into each other's hair by the river, both of us drunk on possibility and the electric thrill of having our whole lives ahead. We'd made drunken promises about growing old together, becoming those eccentric ladies who laughed too loud in restaurants.

Now here we were. Half a lifetime later.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

She slid the iPhone across the table, face down. Outside, rain streaked the window like hieroglyphics nobody remembered how to read.

"I think I'm going to answer the riddle," she said, and finally smiled. "Walking. I'm choosing walking. Even if it means doing it alone."

The sphinx, satisfied, released her grip. We ordered another drink and didn't say anything at all, which was its own kind of answer, and perhaps the only one that had ever really mattered.