The Sphinx in Room 304

They'd called him Sphinx in college because you could never read him. Matt would sit at the center of parties, that inscrutable smile playing at his lips, while everyone tried to decipher what he was thinking. He never gave anything away. Not his feelings, not his intentions, not the fact that he was slowly dying inside even then.

Now, twenty-three years later, I sat beside his hospital bed watching the sunlight catch the dust motes floating around us. He'd lost forty pounds since the diagnosis. The man who'd once commanded every room he entered now looked like something weather had worn down to its essence.

"You still taking those vitamins?" he rasped. His voice had changed—thinner, like reeds.

I laughed. The sound was too loud in the quiet room. "Every morning. Like clockwork. Meanwhile, you're" —I gestured at the IV drip—"getting the good stuff."

His eyes found mine. For the first time since we'd met, I could read them perfectly. They said: don't leave yet.

"Remember when we played that baseball game freshman year?" he asked. "You hit that home run and broke the dean's window?"

"He made me pay for it out of my work-study checks for six months."

"Worth it." His hand twitched on the blanket. I reached over and his palm closed around mine—thin, dry, trembling. The Sphinx finally letting someone in.

We sat like that while visitors passed in the hallway, while phones buzzed with messages about deadlines and dinner plans, while the world kept spinning completely indifferent to this room where everything had stopped.

I looked at our joined hands and thought about how friendship is really just showing up. Over and over. Even when it's hard. Especially then.

"Hey," he whispered. "Thanks for being the one who never stopped trying to figure me out."

I squeezed his hand. "I never did figure you out."

"No." He smiled, really smiled, for the first time in months. "But you kept looking anyway."

The Sphinx had been right about some things. Some answers aren't found. They're earned through the asking itself.