The Weight of Waiting

The pool hadn't been drained in years. Green scum collected at the edges, and Sarah wondered how much of her father's life had dissolved into that stagnant water. She was running late again—always running lately—as if motion could outrun grief.

"You're avoiding the sphinx," her therapist had said during their last session. "You know the riddle. You just don't want to answer it."

The riddle: What do you do when the person who made you disappears?

Sarah kicked at the coaxial cable snaking through the overgrown yard, a remnant of her father's obsession with conspiracy theories. He'd spent his final years glued to the television, piecing together patterns that only he could see. She used to bring him spinach from the garden, watching him pretend to eat while he lectured her about government monitoring programs and secret societies.

Now she stood at the pool's edge, staring at her own distorted reflection. The cable still connected to nothing—the service had been cut years ago. But Dad had kept paying the bill, convinced the signals would come back.

She remembered finding him here last winter, his thin frame curled in the lawn chair, remote control clutched in his hand like a lifeline. The coroner said heart failure. Sarah knew better: he'd simply waited himself to death.

"They're coming, Sarah," he'd told her a week before he died. "I have to be ready."

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the folded newspaper obituary she'd been carrying for three days. Her finger traced the words: "survived by his daughter, who never understood him."

"That's not true," she whispered to the empty backyard. "I understood. I just didn't want to believe."

The sphinx's riddle had an answer, she realized. You don't move on. You carry the weight like a stone in your chest, heavy but manageable. You learn that understanding and believing are different things, and sometimes love means accepting the difference.

Sarah dropped the obituary onto the pool's surface. It floated for a moment before the water pulled it under. Then she turned and walked back toward the house, the cable still snaking through the weeds behind her, running not away anymore, but toward whatever came next.