What the Sphinx Asaks at Midnight

The apartment felt cavernous without Sarah's things. Three weeks after she packed her life into cardboard boxes, Marcus still found himself reaching for her in the half-light between sleep and waking.

He stood before the full-length mirror in the hallway, examining his face. The vitamin regimen she'd insisted he start sat on the bathroom counter, a colorful array of promises—D3 for mood, omega-3 for heart, biotin for the hair that was already abandoning him. He swallowed them dry, a ritual of hope he no longer believed in.

Work was no better. The new CEO, some twenty-something Tech **bull** who'd never known failure, had spent the morning meeting declaring that "passion" would now be a metric on performance reviews. Marcus had wanted to laugh. Instead he'd nodded, imagining the sphinx he'd seen in Egypt years ago—ancient, inscrutable, asking riddles with no answers. The sphinx had known something these startup kids didn't: some questions devour you.

He came home to darkness. The television had been disconnected weeks ago; he'd finally called to cancel the **cable** this afternoon. No more background noise to fill the silence. No more distractions from the question that had been haunting him since Sarah walked out: *What had he been wrong about?*

The answer came to him at midnight, standing at the window watching rain trace paths down the glass. He'd been wrong about stillness. Wrong about the terrifying possibility of simply being with himself.

He drove to the 24-hour gym. The pool was empty, lit by harsh fluorescent tubes that turned the water something not quite blue. He'd stopped **swimming** years ago, somewhere between the mortgage and the promotions and the dinners that felt like performances. Now he slipped into the water, and for the first time in months, his mind quieted.

The answer wasn't in the vitamins or the performance metrics or the marriage that had become two people living parallel lives. The answer was in the water, in the dark, in the admission that sometimes the sphinx's riddle has no solution—only the asking.

He swam until his arms burned, until the question became less important than the stroke, the breath, the undeniable fact of being alive, alone, and somehow, for the first time, present.