What the Sphinx Forgot to Ask

I became a zombie at 34. Not the walking dead kind—the corporate variety. Three years of mergers, and I'd forgotten how to feel anything beyond exhaustion and vague resentment.

The hair thing started in February. Mia noticed first.

"You're losing it," she said, running her fingers through my thinning hair. "Like a cat shedding in summer."

"Stress." I pulled away. "It'll grow back."

But we both knew it wouldn't. Not like before.

I worked in an office full of sphinxes—people who'd stopped asking questions because they'd forgotten the riddles mattered. We bore our losses quietly, competently. Denise's divorce. Mark's bankruptcy. My mother's funeral, attended via Teams link while I finalized a Q3 report.

"You're disappearing," Mia told me one night, tears in her eyes. "I can see right through you."

"I'm fine."

"You're not. You haven't been fine since she died."

That's when I noticed—the bear. Not an actual bear, but the weight of it. The ancient, impossible heaviness I'd been carrying around, pretending it wasn't crushing me.

I called in sick the next day. Called my mother's number, just to hear her voice on the old greeting. Sobbed until my ribs ached.

Mia found me on the bathroom floor, holding the phone like a lifeline.

"I don't know who I am without her," I whispered.

She crawled beside me, wrapped her arms around my unfamiliar frame. "We'll figure it out. Together."

Our cat, Luna, whom we'd inherited from my mother, padded in and settled between us. Purring. Alive.

Some riddles don't have answers. But some do.

"I think," I said, "I might finally be waking up."