What the Sphinx Forgot to Ask

The cable frayed somewhere between here and there, just like everything else in our marriage. Elena sat at the kitchen table in Bath, watching rain trace paths down the window, while I floated three miles beneath the Atlantic, repairing the transoceanic fiber line that carried our words to each other's screens.

"You're underwater again?" she asked, her voice crackling through my headset. The time delay made everything sound like an accusation.

"Just a routine maintenance check, love." I watched the **water** press against the viewport, that crushing weight that made me feel safe in ways our apartment never had.

"Marcus, we haven't touched in three months."

I'd met Elena at the British Museum, where she'd spent seven years studying the Great **Sphinx** of Giza, writing papers about erosion patterns and forgotten dynasties. She loved things that endured. I loved things that could be severed with a sharp enough blade.

The cable before me glowed faintly in the submersible's lights. A shark moved through the darkness beyond, unhurried, ancient. Above, the world kept streaming data—emails, declarations of love, stock trades, secret confessions—all flowing through threads we'd laid across ocean floors like nervous systems for a planet that couldn't stop talking.

"What if I can't do this anymore?" Elena's voice thin now. "What if the answer to the riddle is just... sometimes things end?"

The Sphinx, she'd told me once, wasn't really about mystery. It was about the arrogance of asking questions at all. The assumption that everything could be solved if you just thought hard enough, loved deeply enough, waited patiently enough.

I reached for the fraying cable, my gloved fingers trembling. Some breaks could be spliced. Some connections could be restored. But not everything that breaks should be fixed.

"I know," I said.

And somewhere between my words reaching her and her silence reaching me, I finally understood what the Sphinx had been trying to tell us all along: that some questions aren't meant to be answered, only asked, and that the only thing more arrogant than demanding answers from the universe is expecting them from each other.