What the Riddle Remembers

The night Elias told me he was leaving, I was making spinach with garlic—his favorite, though he hadn't eaten it in years. The smell filled our small kitchen, bitter and green, as he stood in the doorway with his suitcase already packed. He looked like a stranger.

'I'm done,' he said. 'I can't do this anymore.'

I wanted to ask what 'this' was, but I already knew. It was the silences that had grown between us like weeds, the way I'd started sleeping on the couch because his breathing kept me awake, the endless afternoon we spent in Egypt staring at the sphinx, unable to speak. The riddle it offered had nothing on ours.

The next morning, I went to work and sat through a meeting where Marcus—that bullish VP from operations—roared about quarterly projections. I thought about the bear I'd seen in Yellowstone with Elias, how we'd held hands watching it lumber through tall grass, both of us feeling something like holiness. That was five years ago.

Now my hair is starting to silver at the temples. Elias's was already gone when he left, thin and patchy like his explanations. Sometimes I catch my reflection in shop windows and wonder who this woman is, whether she's still worth loving.

Marcus cornered me by the coffee maker yesterday. 'You look tired, Sarah.' His hand brushed my shoulder, stayed too long. I thought about letting it stay. I thought about a lot of things.

The spinach went bad in the refrigerator. I threw it out this morning, slimy and black, while the coffee brewed. Some riddles solve themselves, eventually. The rest you just learn to live with.