Three Seconds of Goldfish

The notification pinged at 2:47 AM, illuminating my face in the darkness of my bedroom. iPhone screen glowing, I swiped left to silence it, but another ping followed. Then another. Instagram stories, Snap streaks, TikTok notifications – a cascade of digital anxiety I couldn't escape.

"You're acting like a goldfish with that thing," my mom had said earlier that evening, gesturing at my phone. "Three seconds of attention span, then – whoosh – gone to the next distraction."

I'd rolled my eyes so hard they almost got stuck. Whatever, Boomer. She didn't get it. Nobody did.

The notification kept pinging. Weird, because most of my friends were asleep (or pretending to be). I finally checked, expecting another dumb meme from Jake. Instead, my screen displayed something impossible – an old, weathered photograph of the Great Sphinx of Giza, but with eyes that seemed to follow me. Caption: "Riddle me this, child of the screen."

My heart hammered. Hacker? Glitch? I almost blocked it, but curiosity – that fatal, glorious teenage flaw – made me type back: "who r u??"

The response came instantly: "I am what was forgotten before you were born. I am silence in a world of noise. I am the question your devices cannot answer."

Okay, dramatic much. But also... weirdly compelling?

"What's the riddle?" I typed, my thumb hovering over the send button.

"I have a voice that cannot speak. I have eyes that cannot see. I have lived for thousands of years, but I am not alive. What am I?"

I stared at my iPhone, the Sphinx's face still watching from my screen. The answer hit me like a physical blow. A recording. A digital footprint. Everything I posted, everything I shared – immortalized in servers I couldn't see, haunting the internet forever.

"A recording," I typed slowly. "Or... a memory."

"Correct. Now your turn: I forget everything in three seconds, yet I remember everything that matters. What am I?"

My throat tightened. A goldfish's memory? No, that was the myth. The real answer was something else – something about choosing what to remember, about what actually mattered in a world drowning in content.

Before I could respond, another notification popped up. Marcus from chemistry had posted a new story. His smile, his messy dark hair, the way he'd looked at me yesterday when I'd actually put down my phone to ask him about his basketball game.

I typed to the Sphinx: "A heart."

"Perhaps," it replied. "Or perhaps someone learning which notifications are worth answering."

The screen went dark. I set my iPhone on my nightstand, turned away, and closed my eyes. Some things you can't capture in pixels anyway.