The Summer We Kept Secrets

The baseball fields behind the high school were where we went when we couldn't stand the silence of your apartment anymore. You'd lean against the chain-link fence, cigarette burning down to your fingers, while I sat on the hood of my car watching the sun paint everything gold. We were twenty-three and thought we knew everything about love, which mostly meant we knew how to hurt each other with surgical precision.

That July, your iphone started lighting up with messages you wouldn't explain. I'd catch you thumbing through notifications in the bathroom, the door cracked just enough to see the blue glow wash over your face. You called it work. I called it surveillance. The trust between us had become like the sphinx—ancient, crumbling, and full of riddles neither of us could solve.

"You're acting like a spy," I said one night, drunk on cheap wine and the thrill of confrontation. "Who are you texting at 3 AM?"

You didn't answer. You just stared through me, and that was when I knew whatever we'd been building had already collapsed.

The irony was that I'd been your friend first, for three years before we became something more. I knew how you took your coffee, which songs made you cry, that you still checked your ex's Instagram every Sunday morning. But I didn't know who you were anymore, or if I ever had.

The baseball season ended. You moved out. I kept driving past those fields, remembering how you'd look at me sometimes like I was a riddle you couldn't quite solve, like maybe you were the one who'd been spied on all along.

Some truths aren't worth uncovering. Sometimes the sphinx keeps its secrets, and you learn to live with the not-knowing.