The Riddle We Never Solve

Maria died on a Tuesday. I found out through my iPhone, the screen glowing with the hospital's message like some cruel oracle. We hadn't spoken in three years—not since the day she walked out of our shared apartment with a suitcase and a goodbye that felt more like a question than an answer.

I spent that evening at a baseball game, alone in Section 214. The Dodgers were losing, and I kept thinking about how my father used to bring me here. He'd buy me a vitamin drink from the concession stand—something fluorescent orange that tasted like sugar and regret—and explain the game's geometry. The field was a diamond, but really, he said, it was all about the pyramid of strategy building toward that final run. He'd been selling nutritional supplements then, working his way up a multi-level marketing scheme that collapsed when I was twelve, taking his optimism with it.

The woman beside me noticed my phone, the unanswered message still lit. "You okay?" she asked. Her name was Sarah. She had sphinx-like eyes—dark, knowing, holding riddles she wouldn't speak aloud.

We ended up at a bar on Sunset. Sarah designed corporate wellness programs for tech companies. "Everyone wants to believe there's a pyramid to happiness," she said, tracing patterns on the condensation of her glass. "Exercise at the base, relationships in the middle, purpose at the peak. But it's all just selling vitamins to people who are already dying."

I told her about Maria, about the email I'd never sent. About how Maria had loved Egyptology, had once dragged me to see a traveling exhibit on pyramid construction. She'd stood before a sphinx statue and whispered, "Imagine knowing all the answers but being unable to speak them."

Sarah kissed me then, fierce and desperate, like she was trying to outrun something chasing us both. We went to her apartment. In bed, I thought about how baseball games end, how Egypt fell, how the body eventually rejects even the most expensive vitamins. Some riddles, I realized, aren't meant to be solved—they're meant to be lived.

The next morning, I replied to the hospital's message. Then I deleted Maria's number. Outside Sarah's window, Los Angeles rose like a pyramid of light and ambition, silent as a sphinx, withholding its answers. Some days you swing and miss. Some days, you just put down the bat and walk away.